Dutch florists cultivate rainbow roses _ flower information

Red roses represent enthusiasm and romance, yellow roses symbolize friendship, and pink roses express gratitude.

If you can't make up your mind, or if you want a lady to guess your mind, try Rainbow Rose.

This colorful rose, called Rainbow Rose or Happy Rose, is the latest strange gift variety.

Rainbow roses are derived from white roses. The specific process is to make the stems of white roses absorb different colors of food pigments in the water, and then transmit them to the petals.

The process takes 12 to 24 hours, but it is not known how different petals show different colors.

This is the trade secret of Peter van der Wilken, the inventor and Dutch florist. Before breeding rainbow roses, he also cultivated colorful chrysanthemums.

Wilken first bought long-stemmed Fendra roses, dyed them, and then distributed them around the world. Rainbow roses still have a sweet smell and bloom as long as ordinary roses, but their leaves may fall quickly.

Rainbow roses sell more than 1 million roses a year, mainly to Japan, Italy and Sweden. Among them, Sweden is the most prominent, and the varieties sold to that country are blue and yellow, similar to the Swedish flag. Now Britons can buy rainbow roses through Interrose.co.uk, an online flower website.

But rainbow roses are expensive, with each selling for 24.49 pounds and 12 for 64.87 pounds, more than double the price of the same number of red roses.