A weekend trip to a home furnishing shop led to my gazing at
a display of artificial flowers – yes, you can now find fake horse chestnut
branches, free of bleeding cankers, with spiky capsules and all. However,
looking at the limited selection of roses, I thought to myself, “if you can’t
make real blue roses, how come you can’t buy a fake one?”
Blue roses, something never found in nature, are desirable
precisely because they are unattainable: in Chinese folklore, the idea of them
are used to signify unrequited love, while in the western world, mystery, the
impossible, and quests for the impossible are often highlighted by the flower. These
ideas were formed at a time when the colour blue itself was very expensive, formed
using cobalt or lapis lazuli, and featuring rarely until synthetic dyes were
introduced in the 19th century. Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Blue Roses”
depicts a man’s “idle quest” across the world to find the roses his love truly
wants, despite being able to freely pick red and white ones – when he finally
returns, she has died: “It may be beyond the grave / She shall find what she
would have.”
So, if you have bought a blue rose, it will have been a
white rose dyed blue, unless you have come across “Applause,” a rose cultivated
after twenty years of research between the Australian company Florigene, and
Suntory, its Japanese parent company, more of which later. It appears to be as “blue”
as a blue greyhound – it is actually more lilac in appearance, and the research
on producing a bluer rose is ongoing. In the meantime, “Applause” is on general
sale as a luxury item, particularly geared towards a Japan, where “Ikebana,”
its tradition of flower arranging, is taught in schools.
The strangest aspect of this rose is the presence of
Suntory, as its company in the UK is known as Lucozade Ribena Suntory – in
January 2014, it bought the drinks division of GlaxoSmithKline, minus Horlicks,
which the British pharmaceutical company opted to keep. Suntory began as the
name of a whisky, but now own brands such as Jim Beam, Teacher’s whisky,
Courvoisier brandy, and Orangina. Suntory owns the vineyard Château
Lagrange, in Bordeaux, where a high percentage of the grapes planet are
cabernet sauvignon – delphinidin, the blue pigment in this type of grape, was
transferred to “Applause.” Meanwhile, Suntory’s business as the exclusive
Japanese bottler and distributor for Pepsi has made its way into the anime
version of the manga series “Tiger & Bunny,” where its superhero characters
receive on-screen sponsorship by real-life companies – the character sponsored by Pepsi is named “Blue
Rose,” which I have concluded is a happy accident.
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