Dreaming of Blue Roses

The wild flower called ‘Orangkaegot’

Recently on my daily walks near my house, I’ve been delighted by a lovely little blue flower that seems to grow all along the borders of  the pathways and tracks around here. It’s just a weed, called  ‘Orangkaegot’ in Korean, but what struck me is just how blue it is – or at least, how blue some of the specimens are, as its flowers vary from  royal blue  to purplish-blue. 

Blue is not a common colour in flowers. The petunia, for example, synthesizes blue pigment  and produces pure blue petals.   The higher the pH in the cellular vacuoles  - the closed sacs, made of membranes with   organic molecules inside - in which blue pigment is accumulated, the more pure blue  the colour will be. So the petunia and ‘Orangkaegot’ must have a pretty high pH in their cellular vacuoles.

I’ve just finished my book or the cultural history of the rose, and the next big thing in the world of commercial roses  will be the first truly blue rose. This is the Holy Grail of rose breeding.  The association of the colour blue with dreaming, melancholy, the impossible, transcendence,  infinity, and the soul itself, suggests that a blue coloured rose would certainly evoke some interesting reactions.  For the German Romantic poet Novalis the ‘blue  flower’ became a   metaphor for the unobtainable and impossible heights towards which the true poet must reach,  even at the risk of self-destruction.

Meilland’s rose ‘Charles de Gaulle’ and  Tantau’s  ‘Mainzer Fastnacht’ ( known in Britain as ‘Blue Moon’)  both  claim to be blue, but they are not.  Nor by any objective estimation is a more recent Japanese effort called "Suntory  Blue Rose Applause’, marketed in 2005 after twenty years of research, to be described as ‘blue’. All these roses are lilac.

‘Suntory  Blue Rose Applause’. Blue? I don’t think so!

Nevertheless, the Arab agriculturalist Ibn-el- ‘Awwam in his  12th century treatise on agriculture and gardening declares that ‘the colours of Roses are very many, red, white, yellow, the colour of zulite (celestial blue) and another which is blue outside and yellow within.’ But it is probable that the roses he describes were hand dyed to look blue.

it is not simply  a case of inserting a blue gene from a petunia or an ‘Orangkaegot’ into the rose’s DNA to create a blue rose. If this was attempted, it would, apparently, form a pink pigment. In fact,  if we try to change the genes that determine cell pH there is the risk of changing a whole range of other cell functions as well.   But at    least  in theory,   a very small interior change can cause a revolutionary outward one.  Recently, an  Indian-Chinese team of biochemists attempted to manipulate  bacterial enzymes in the petals of  white rose to convert L-glutamine in the blue pigment indogoidine. The bacteria transferred the pigment-producing genes to the rose genome, and as a result, a blue colour spread from the injection site. But there was one big problem: the colour (which certainly looks blue in the photographs I have seen), is short-lived and patchy, and requires each time the injection of the enzyme.   

It seems Mother Nature cannot be sufficiently coerced, and so the blue rose remains as impossible today as it was for the German Romantics, although by the time my book is published, science may have finally triumphed. One thing for sure, whoever  succeeds in producing a truly blue rose will become very rich. In our novelty-obsessed culture,  such a rose is bound to be a sure-fire hit.

But a final thought. While the ingredients necessary to form blue pigmentation have almost certainly not been part of the rose’s chemistry for the past few thousand years, it  is   certainly possible that   there used to exist  a blue rose that went extinct. So perhaps, as the ice melts due to global warming, the seeds of a long extinct blue rose will be revealed  and coaxed into life, and we shall have blue roses once again, courtesy of Mother Nature herself, inadvertently aided, to be sure, by human ecological malpractice.