Mission Impossible: blue roses
The flower industry is an "aesthetic industry." Like clothes designers, those in the field aim to keep ahead of trends and are constantly looking to innovate.
Take, for instance, the recent Chinese New Year's season. Apart from moth orchids (Phalaenopsis), which are traditional for Chinese New Year's in Taiwan, the colorful double-petaled Kalanchoe blossfeldiana also made a big splash, and Foreport Enterprises introduced a new variety of chrysanthemum from Holland-"Delifuego"-which is golden yellow on the outside and dark red on the inside. It creates a splendid and luxurious effect.
These are all regarded as outstanding varieties by importers and expert breeders from various nations.
Yet fashion is fickle, and breeders must constantly innovate.
In 1997, when breeders from Taiwan succeeded in registering a poinsettia variety in America, Chu Chien-young, a professor of horticulture at National Chung Hsing University, who at the time was helping to revise the Plant Variety and Plant Seed Act, advocated that Taiwan ought to start breeding plants and patenting new cultivars. Otherwise, other nations would divide up the market.
The breeding of flowers includes creating new varieties and cultivars through hybridization or mutation, as well as planting, artificially selecting and cultivating pre-existing varieties to create new varieties.
Early on, most breeders were simply selecting desirable qualities. For instance, to create Taitung's "Dong Selection No. 1 Day Lily," a selection of day lilies were imported from the United States, which then underwent selection for traits suited to Taiwan.
Selective breeding of fruits and vegetables aims for disease resistance, high yields, desirable harvest periods and so forth. On the other hand, when breeding flowers, apart from selecting for ease of cultivation and disease resistance, the main goal is to find something new and different to pique the interest of consumers and spark a buying frenzy.
Take, for instance, the moth orchids. Chen points out that the moth orchid that wins at an orchid exhibition isn't necessarily the prettiest flower-but rather the one that shows the greatest uniqueness.
"Whether you're talking about flower color or shape, the greater the differences in the 'character' of the new variety, the more likely it will win awards."
In recent years no new variety of flower has caused as much of a sensation as the "Suntory blue rose Applause" from Japan.
Whiskey maker Suntory employed more than 100 PhD-level researchers and spent 14 years and ¥3 billion (NT$1.6 billion) to extract the genes for blue coloration from pansies. It implanted those extracted genes into a rose and thus attained the flower breeder's holy grail: a blue rose.
At ¥3000 (about US$33) a stem, this genetically engineered flower hit the market in 2007. The first blue bloom among the 2500 varieties of roses, it has made people recognize the enormous amount of work that goes into flower breeding.
Chu Chien-young crossbred Kalanchoe garambiensis, which grows on southern Taiwan's Eluanbi Peninsula, with K. blossfeldiana, a native of Europe, to create early-flowering, bushy cultivars. Shown here is NHCU No. 3, a double-petalled K. blossfeldiana variety.(courtesy of Chu Chien-young)