The Blue Rose

Blue Rose Beaded Pendant

Blue roses are, along with a black orchid, an impossibility. I mean, nowadays we can genetically splice them with a chunk of the sky or whatever and turn them blue, but back when people had to either find one or genetically manipulate one through the old and slow ways of selective breeding, well, it was like a fairy tale.

Which is how blue roses ended up in an episode of the Smurfs, which is really the only reason I know anything about them at all.  In the episode, Smurfette offers her own blue color in exchange for a blue rose.

What she doesn't realize is that when her color goes to the white rose, she gains its color--and its scent. Smurfette then spends the rest of the episode wearing a bee-keeper's outfit and trying to fend off bees.  At least until she's forced to realize what a mistake it was to mess with the natural order of things and broke the spell of color-change.

Sometimes I think it's a lesson that all the people who are genetically manipulating our food ought to learn.  Nature has its own time, its own pace, and its own way of doing things.  I know that genetics has brought us many things--some of them even good things--but I also feel that we've perhaps embraced the idea of apples that taste like grapes a bit too wholeheartedly, and that perhaps we really ought to think of what we're messing with here. 

Because unlike with Smurfette, we can't just break the spell and put everything back in the proper order before the commercial break.