Blue Orchid Flower

Tweaking Nature: A Blue Orchid Flower

Blue is quite a rare colour for flowers, there are the obvious ones like blue bells, but equally when did you last see a blue rose?  The orchid in its extraordinary style offers us two blue flowers.  The coerulescens where by the sepals are white and the blue colour only shows on the lip.  The other blue orchid flower is a coerulea where the sepals are blue.

There is one known blue orchid flower.  The vanda coerulea (also called the vanda blue magic) comes from Northern India and this has a natural blue flower, which blossoms during October and November.  This blue orchid flower will often have as many as fifteens blossoms on each plant, with each flower being up to four inches in size.  Being from India, this blue orchid flower does not like the cold and needs to be in a temperature which does not drop below sixteen degrees centigrade.

The creation of a hybrid blue orchid flower has kept many an orchid grower busy, but has usually proved elusive to the weekend gardener or the hobbyist.

If you are going to try to create a hybrid blue orchid flower you need to first choose the plants you are going to use.  Some plants flower in a slightly different colour in different environments, so you are best to choose on where the petals are predominantly blue and not just at the edges or when in full bloom.  It is also best to choose an orchid which can be grown under normal circumstances as this will make any recreations easier.

There seems to be colour dominance when creating a different coloured orchid hybrid.  It is believed that using an orchid with a greenish colour will produce a hybrid with a bluish tone, however, if there is any orange in the plant the new hybrid seems to come out rather reddish in colour.

The colours in flowers occurs when a chemical reaction between the pigment anthocyanin and a co-pigment.  This chemical reaction will only cause the desired colour result if it happens at a specific pH level.  The scientists assure us that to achieve a blue orchid flower you will need the chemical reaction to take place in an alkaline environment and a more acidic environment will produce a redder colour.

As you can see, to produce a blue orchid flower hybrid you need a lot of things to be right, apart from the starting plants you need the correct chemical reaction, in the correct environment.  Even if this does produce a blue orchid flower you will need to establish the correct conditions for cultivating and reproducing your new hybrid.  It could certainly take a lifetime to refine one flower!