In Search of the Blue Rose

Actually, I'm not looking at all. I admit, the notion was intriguing, back when I leaped headlong into rose culture, and I will admit to a certain measure of naive hope that one of my little sports would miraculously be blue: a vibrant, heaven-has-smiled-upon-me Blue, and I would make buckets of million dollar bills and my family would stop giving me grief about my misspent life as an artist.

And then I began to do a bit of research.

It seems that vibrant, heaven-has-smiled-upon-me Blues are born of a pigment called delphinidin. Roses do not have it. What they do have, is something called cyanidin, which is common in pink or red flowers. I was beginning to see a pattern here.

Back in the early 90's, I think it was, there were a lot of buzz about an Australian company, Florigene, that had not only isolated, but patented.. yes, you guessed it.. the gene in petunias that makes them blue. After some breathless gene splicing, the new rose was born, and voila.. not a blue bone to its body.

They did give us a "blue" carnation, and a purple carnation, and have a "black" carnation due for release this year, but the pictures I've seen of them seem more like apologies than triumphs. The blue is .. well.. sort of mauvey, the purple is very purple if we are to believe the photographs, and still we wait for the elusive Blue Rose.

I hope they don't make it. For one, it seems like cheating somehow to force the issue. It's not that I think gene splicing is evil, or that bizarre mutations will be springing up like jimson weed; I don't. And I'm certainly all for the industry of enterprise, but I don't think I'll have one of the manufactured ones. They've gummed up the carnation enough to shake my faith that their blue rose will be anything of astounding beauty.

Even the photographs of the so-called blue roses (you know the ones, in those cheesie catalogues where everything in the picture is vaguely blue, including the hand pointing to the Amazing! Incredible! UnBelievable BreakThrough! rose) are rather creepy. I've never ordered any, but unnamed relatives have, and I don't have to tell you, they weren't blue. They were Vaguely Lilac, Washed Out Lilac, Hopefully Lilac, I-wish-I-were-blue-but-I'm-not Lilac and sometimes Screamingly Purple like large bruises hanging on the ends of pained limbs. But never, ever, was even one heaven-has-smiled-upon-me Blue.

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