I was a young teenager when I planted my first rose. A hybrid tea variety called ‘Blue Moon’, I assumed its name was an accurate indicator of the colour of its flowers. But when the large, perfumed, pale lavender-mauve blooms unfurled the following year, they taught me a valuable lesson. There is, it turned out, no such thing as a blue rose, despite the efforts of countless plant breeders over many centuries to produce one. Instead, there are roses whose varietal names tantalisingly suggest them to be so, but whose flowers come in generally mawkish shades of purple. Even the modern variety known as ‘Applause’, genetically engineered to be capable of producing the blue plant pigment known as delphinidin and proudly announced as “the world’s first true blue rose”, is nothing of the sort, with flowers the colour of Swizzels Parma Violets.
The very next valuable lesson my teenage self learned about roses was that these shrubby, deciduous plants can be frustratingly challenging to grow well.
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