Hmmm… my very limited experience of Blue For You producing crappy seed (BFY x EFY) does worry me especially in light of your negative findings with BFY OP germinations…I am listening…
I hope my BFY bad results are due to factors / biases not to do with Blue For You’s ability as a seed parent … only time and further experimentation using BFY as a mom rose will tell !!
I got that wrong in two ways. First, the pump proteins work to raise the vacuolar pH. Second, more ions than just hydrogen are involved.
"The increase of vacuolar pH in the petals during flower-opening is due to an active transport of Na+ and / or K+ from the cytosol into the epidermal vacuoles through a sodium- or potassium-driven Na+(K+) / H+ exchanger. This systematic ion transport maintains the weakly alkaline vacuolar pH, producing the sky-blue petals. Over-alkalization is prevented by enzymes. The blue anhydrobase anion of HBA (Heavenly Blue Anthocyanin) must be stabilized by ‘stacking’. "
Anthocyanins as pH-Indicators and Complexing Agents by Peter Keusch
This interesting site also gives more info, history and some pictures demonstrating color changes in flowers.
Karl
Thanks for that clarification and wonderful additional information, Karl.
Kim, My Blue For You is showing new flower buds, now in winter (all autumn it produced I think one flower LOL! )… if these flower buds mature I’ll collect anthers and let you know about the pollen production of my Blue For You flowers. It might give perspective.
Clarification regarding above comment: My Blue For You has been very stressed due to being restricted in a pot, that is why it is performing badly flower wise… in my location, other large and very established BFY specimens in the ground have given lots of repeat flowers throughout the season, so please don’t take my specimen’s poor performance (esp. lack of flowers) as representative of BFY’s peformance in my location.
I just skimmed thru that article Jim Turner (jturner) linked further up this thread.
err… the main message I got was that it is impossible to breed a blue rose by traditional hybridization because rose petals lack delphinidin in nature…
Comments?
George,
That only means we can’t go out and find a delphinium blue rose to get our start.
The fact that some roses do produce myrecitin, a precursor to delphinidin, allows the possibility that delphinidin might turn up if the myrecitin-bearing roses are bred together on a very large scale.
Pelargonin is not the dominant pigment in any wild roses, though some species and old varieties (e.g., General Jacqueminot) carry traces of that orange-red pigment. We cannot find an orange species to start us off, but pelargonin did show up, repeatedly, as the chief pigment in some Dwarf Polyanthas and their descendants (e.g, Gloria Mundi, Orange Mothersday, Baby Chateau). If anyone had known that pelargonin existed at all, we might have had orange roses sooner.
The rosacyanins offer an alternative to delphinidin. The trick will be to increase their quantity while also decreasing the quantity of simple anthocyanins. The rosacyanins were first reported in 2006, so any older statements about delphinidin being the only path to blue in roses are out-of-date.
Karl
I wonder if B4Y is more productive budded? It’s only available own root here. It grows and flowers well, but hip set is marginal. My in-ground one has half day sun, shaded by the house and an overhanging black walnut tree (complete with litter and roots). The potted one is rooted from that one and is still young, though it has two self set hips forming on it at this moment. Neither releases pollen easily, or really at all.
I noticed that Banksiae lutescens released massive amounts of pollen earlier in the year before it got hot. As it warmed, the pollen release diminished to zero, even when ground. I’ve noticed similar performance from several others, though some remain heavy producers of easily released pollen. I’m curious if it is heat reduced pollen production, or if the waxes which secure it to the anthers changes with heat to prevent its release?
@ Karl, ok the article linked above is out of date.
@ Kim, all those things could be true. There are soooooo many factors at play. My B4U is budded, as I suspect are the local very established B4U bushes in my neighborhood, (and prolly every other B4U in this country !).
Those in my neighborhood that have been in the ground for many years now are LOADED with OP hips, evey year.
Based on that observation, I have named it HO, however that is not confirmed with my own breeding results, yet.
That is why I am holding on to hopes one day mine will be a good seed parent, it is already responding to being removed from its pot by showing lots of vigor (even in winter now), since being ploncked into real EARTH (a rare commodity round here in innermost-western Sydney).
lol… soooo there is apparently hope a blue rose really can be engineered without GM !
It seems to me there are two types of blue showing up, those from red roses and those that look blueish-white( Silver Seas & Angle Face), plus the pale blueish-pink seedlings from Heirloom and others. Neil
My assumption has been that Heirloom descends from Chrisler Imperial.
A poor boy option may be to look thru a filter(stage light filter), using a green filter the reds either look deep mauve or more blue. The more blue would be what you want. The best lighter blues was from Heirloom and a pink rose. The best blue was from a sickly two year old disease ridden seedling from Crimson Glory. This may be of interest.Infrared Goggles for $10, inexpensive IR filters, SCIENCE HOBBYIST
In the other blue thread some roses were mentioned as models that sorta surprise me, some are quite red /black/purple on that list.
Soooo might Blue For You be any good in the quest for achieving true blue babies?
I don’t know if it contains or transmits the required pigments, but it does “blue” quite effectively here. It can open quite red purple, aging to nearly the “dove gray” of OGRs with quite a bit of blue tones.
Lets face it, the color of roses is certainly not uniform in many/most CV, many complex mixes of pigments are at play, and then there are extraneous influences such as local climate, soil, solar radiation levels, not to mention variability in color perception between observers to add to the complexity of what one sees.
This is all starting to become mind boggling, actually.
BUT… it is FUN !!
One account of the parentage of Blue For you is:
SEED Natural Beauty (hybrid tea, Rogin pre 1999)
POLLEN Summer Wine (climber, Kordes 1985) × SCRIVbell
If this is accurate, it leaves me a little surprised…where the heck did Blue For You get its “violet-spectrum” tones from (I know I am not the first to have asked this Q here on this forum).
BTW Kim, owing to lack of space issues here (plus my own crap results with B4Y plus your slight uncertainty at this point in time regarding the seed bearing usefulleness of B4Y) I am now delegating / relocating my B4Y from my garden where the proven seed parents are, to my mom’s garden where the boy roses are kept.
I’ll be using B4Y mainly for pollen donation come September.