Rainbow roses successfully cultivated by a Dutch florist

Red roses represent passion and romance, yellow roses symbolize friendship, and pink roses express gratitude. If you can't make up your mind, or you want a lady to guess what's on your mind, then you might want to try a rainbow rose. This colorful rose, called the rainbow rose or the happy rose, is the newest kind of novelty gift variety. Rainbow roses are transformed from white roses; the specific process is to have the stem of a white rose absorb different colors of food coloring from the cultivation water in stages, which are then transmitted to the petals. This process takes 12 to 24 hours, but how different petals display different colors is unknown. This is the trade secret of the inventor, Dutch florist Peter van de Werken. Before cultivating rainbow roses, he had also cultivated colored chrysanthemums. Werken first buys long-stemmed Vendela roses, dyes them, and then distributes them around the world. Rainbow roses still carry a sweet fragrance, and their vase life is as long as that of ordinary roses, but the leaves may drop quickly. Annual sales of rainbow roses reach more than 1 million stems, mainly to Japan, Italy and Sweden. Sweden stands out the most, with the variety sold to that country being blue and yellow, closely resembling the Swedish flag. Now British people can buy rainbow roses through the online flower-selling website Interrose.co.uk. But rainbow roses are not cheap: a single stem sells for 24.49 pounds, and 12 stems sell for 64.87 pounds, more than twice the price of the same number of red roses.