How to Make Blue Roses

Hi. This is Yolanda Vanveen. And in this segment, we're going to talk about how to grow blue roses. Now there's no true blue roses in the world. There's a few companies that sell what they call blue roses, but they're actually a real mauvy, purple-tinted blue. And the pictures that you see in catalogs look blue, but really when you get them and grow them, they're really a mauve. So the only way that you can grow or have a real blue rose is to dye it. So what happens is a florist will take a white rose and actually just spray paint it blue with a blue paint. Or you can take the blue dye and put it in the water. It'll soak up that blue dye, and then the rose will turn blue. And so there's lots of companies that are trying to create blue roses, as we speak. And what they're doing is they take the blue gene out of a delphinium or any other flower, and then they turn around; it's called delphinine; and they have actually taken it out of primroses and other types of plants, and they're injecting that gene into roses. And they're trying to get a blue rose that way. And so far, they've only come up with the mauve-tinted roses. But I'm sure in the future, as they continually try to modify the genes of current roses by adding the blue gene from any other blue plant, eventually they will come up with a blue rose. But for now, you have to dye them or you have to get the mauve roses to have a blue rose.