About 12,000 years ago, human beings started making the long transition from gathering wild plants for food to growing those plants. As more humans turned to practicing agriculture, they probably began to do what is now known as “selective breeding”—choosing plants that were bigger, or bore tastier fruits—and sowing the seeds of those plants in the hopes of producing new plants that would bear the same traits. Sometimes that selection process worked, and sometimes it did not. Plant breeding took a great leap forward in the nineteenth century when Gregor Mendel conducted his famous experiments with pea plants, establishing rules for the ways in which specific traits are passed on to succeeding plant generations. Mendel’s discovery is now called Mendelian inheritance or Mendelian genetics.
I thought of this a couple of weeks ago when I was in the supermarket picking out a bunch of cut flowers to brighten up my house. My gaze landed on a nice bouquet of spray roses, with relatively small individual blooms produced in small clusters on each stem. The inner petals of those roses were shell pink, but the rows of outer petals were pale green. The combination was arresting and unusual, which made me want to buy the bouquet and learn more about pink and green roses.
I am highly susceptible to an attractive rose.
An online search revealed that the pink and green roses that I bought in the supermarket were “florists’ roses”—blooms bred and grown specifically for the cut flower trade, and not generally available to home gardeners. The pink/green combination is popular, with a number of named varieties listed on various merchandisers’ websites. The Dutch firm, DeRuiter, an international company whose motto is “Creating Flower Business”, has introduced a number of
trademarked pink/green varieties, including ‘Daydreaming’, ‘Lorraine’, and ‘Celeb’. Other similar trademarked pink/green roses include ‘Trivia’, ‘Frutteto’, ‘Bellevue’ and ‘Brilliant Stars’.
Species roses, which are the progenitors of all cultivated roses, bloom in only a few colors: white, pink, red, or sometimes yellow. Some cultivated white roses bear a greenish tinge in certain light and soil situations. I suspect that the greenish-tinged roses were used to breed the green/pink florists’ roses that I brought home.
Rose breeding for a specific objective, whether it is intense fragrance, disease resistance or unusual color, takes years of cross breeding, selection of likely plants, and plant trials. For a pink/green rose, breeders might start with one or more of the greenish white varieties and cross them to achieve a reliable pale green color. With that objective met, the hybridizers might cross the best pale green variety with one or more pink-flowered roses. Eventually, a rose might emerge with the desired pink inner petals and pale green outer petals. More selective breeding would take place to ensure that the pink/green coloring and configuration was stable, reappearing reliably in successive rose generations. If the resulting plants were hardy enough for commercial production, the rose would be introduced, its name trademarked, and, ultimately sold to commercial growers for cut flower production.
But why the quest for such an unusual bi-colored rose? The cut flower market caters to an audience of consumers that craves the new and unusual. There will always be a market for roses like ‘American Beauty’, a classic, long-stemmed red rose, but now floriculture is oriented to the fashion cycles that dictate when certain colors are “in” or “out”. For several years running, consumers have wanted celebration flowers with brown or tan overtones, like the ‘Koko Loko’ garden rose or the ‘Café au Lait’ dahlia. Now, it’s possible that the reign of café au lait hues is over, and the fashion cycle has turned to unusual bi-colors like ‘Trivia’.
I love horticultural fashion, but I usually buy flowers because their colors make me feel happy. On one particular winter day in one place, a bunch of pink and green blooms did that. Since I purchased them from a major mass marketer, I am fairly sure that they have the same effect on lots of people. I wish I could grow similar blooms in my home garden, but I may have hold off a few years while garden varieties come to market. The joy will be worth the wait.