I found the article very interesting; I had no idea why roses could not be blue. I agree that your Blue Bayou comes quite close, however.

Where do you buy the Blue Bayou rose?

I had no idea why there couldn't be a blue rose. A very good article and great photos.

I like your article, and I love the photos, but I wish the buyers of roses would not encourage the scientists to 'create' a blue rose.
The blue roses created with the pansy genes are GMOs.
http://www.gmo-compass.org/eng...

The beauty of a 'blue rose' is in the eye of the beholder:
http://www.civprod.com/storyla...

Cute story Greene.

Great article Toni. I'm going to look for Blue Bajou this year. What an interesting and unique color

That is a lovely rose, Toni.

Very interesting and informative! I love articles like this.

The ebay seller with blue rose seeds makes me laugh, but I feel sorry for the people who lose money on that deal!
Thanks for showing us a lovely "almost blue" rose. Love Song is another one that blooms purple-almost-blue.
Fun article, Toni!

Very nice article, thanks. I am not too enamored of plants that are trying to be something they are not intended to be. Your Blue Bayou is a very pretty lavendar, but Applause has just a murky look to it for me.

I bought Blue Bayou from Palatine roses. www.palatineroses.com They're out of Canada. They have some of the absolute BEST mail-order roses I've ever seen. Check out some of these threads about Palatine:

The thread "Palatine's website has been updated for 2013/2014 season" in Roses forum
The thread "And Palatine Delivers!!" in Roses forum

I don't think that they have Blue Bayou this year, but they do have Tardi Gris, which is another "blue" rose, but is much more pink. Here's a list of the blue roses they have this year.

http://palatineroses.com/roses...

Poseidon is another gorgeous blue rose. We have this thread, too, in the Rose Forum, that may be of interest:

The thread "Favorite Fragrant 'Blue' Roses" in Roses forum

Really like Blue Bajou and Singin the Blues! I liked the article very much and found it interesting.

I haven't heard anything good about GMO food production and I don't think it should be allowed to alter rose DNA either. I don't understand how something that has been deemed unsafe is allowed to be used.

well it is deemed unsafe unarguably IMO that eating GMO is bad. But is there any research suggesting that flowers pose any risks when GMO? Suppose we could "invent" a grass that demanded far less water than many popular lawns do now. We're not eating the lawn, wouldn't that be a good thing? or not?

If I went to a car dealer and ordered a BLUE car, I would pretty mad to see a purple car when it was delivered, right? Eye of the beholder is right on target, hybridizers want a "blue" flower so badly, they convince themselves that purple IS blue and give them all sorts of bluish names and then enhance their photos to try to trick people into buying them. Everyone can see it is really purple, just name it that way already...

Frilly - Only problem with GMO with things like grass & whatnot is what if it hybridizes into other things? I'm not saying that your lawn's gonna randomly mutate into a green monster that'll chase the neighbors' kids off & eat them. But what if the grass pollen gets into, say, your daylilies? How do we know that this is not going to create some kind of oddball daylily that will mutate into a green monster that'll chase the neighbors' kids. IMO, nature has created things perfectly the way they're supposed to be. Putting DNA from one thing (I'm going to use GloFish here because I know best about them) into something not even closely related is, IMO, bad. Selectively breeding traits is MUCH different than injecting DNA that doesn't belong. I'm sorry, but putting DNA from jellyfish into danios & tetras is NOT a good thing, even if it's for "cancer research" (I believe that GloFish were actually created in the same way that glowing cats & pigs were.. as cancer research: http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/... and http://blogs.scientificamerica... and http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/... and http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/... ). I personally don't see where jellyfish DNA is meant to be in human DNA. If it was, we would be able to breed naturally with jellyfish & have viable offspring. But breeding roses to create new shapes & colors, or for drought tolerance, or for disease resistance.. all of this is done with roses & roses, not roses and violas or roses and delphiniums. Two separate critters. Heck, you can't even breed roses with strawberries, and they're from the same family! Just isn't going to work naturally. But if you get a "wild" rose (there are wild roses) and see a naturally occurring mutation (10 petals rather than 5), and you breed it to a "normal" wild rose and some of the seedlings have 10 petals, then that's modifying it as well, but NATURALLY. Not by gene splicing. Rose DNA, viola DNA, human DNA.. they all should just be that DNA & not some weird mixture. We're talking centaurs & chimeras here. Not naturally occurring.

/rant off

Well gosh Toni .. I'd love to have a lawn that would eat the neighbor children! Especially around the 4th of July. But I totally agree that transgenic plants and animals are bad. The problem is we still don't understand how genes work synergistically with other genes, which makes it very likely and easy to produce a lethal set.

One of my favorite quotes is from Jurassic Park character Ian Malcom:

"... your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

@Skiekitty,
Thanks, I couldn't have said it better myself.
But may I add one tiny thing.?

Bees. Do you really want to add to the stress and decline of the bee population just to have a pretty flower?
Without bees, no one will have food.

It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.

Anne, I love your reference to Jurassic Park. It is one of my favorites and that line is the key to the whole show. I think we are playing with dynamite with GMO.

greene said:The beauty of a 'blue rose' is in the eye of the beholder:
http://www.civprod.com/storyla...

Excellent story!!