Happy April Fool's Day!
Blue Rose
Every flower breeder's Holy Grail, and every gardener's dream.Any blue rose you see in real life will be artificially dyed. Any blue rose you see online is dyed or photoshopped or AI. The closest that rose breeders have come to a blue rose are varieties like Sterling Silver, (click/swipe to show), a beautiful shade of lilac-grey developed in the 1950s and popular to this day, especially for weddings. There are very few flowers that bloom naturally in pure deep blue, and those that do are always highly sought after. You can find a few here when they're in season, in our Blue Flowers section
Blue Orchid
Like the blue rose, a blue orchid is the dream come true for plant breeders. Any blue orchid you see in real life will be artificially dyed. Any blue orchid you see online is dyed or photoshopped or AI. Orchid growers have not come close to a blue variety; but there are rare orchids like Mediterranean mirror bee orchids (Ophrys speculum - swipe/click), which have patches of true blue on them - which means that these orchids genetically have the capacity in their DNA to produce true blue. Image: Maurid80 cropped to size.Blue Carnation
Carnations have no natural blue in their DNA. So any blue tones have to be artificially introduced via genetic modification in the laboratory. Japanese plant breeders Suntory finally cracked the secret of this technique in the 1990s after decades of trying. Their Moon series of carnations (swipe/click to see) blooms in dark purple, mauve purple, and light purple - for carnations it's as close to blue as possible. So far...A Leaf With Teeth, As Big As a Boat
A leaf so big, you can sail in it like a boat. A leaf so round it's like a giant tea tray. A leaf - with teeth! Flip over an Amazon waterlily and, along with the teethy spines, you'll see the way the ribs radiate out from the centre stem. That gave the great architect Sir Joseph Paxton the idea for building super-strong structures made from panels of glass.Yes, the Amazon waterlily was the inspiration for Crystal Palace. You can see them at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, but you can't take a boat ride any moreRear image Martha de Jong-Lantink ; teeth image Theen Moy
Giant Corpse Flower
Like something from your worst nightmares, or your favourite video game... It's up to a metre wide. It weighs ten kilos. It's got skin like an octopus. And it stinks of rotting flesh.It has no leaves or roots, and feeds on other plants to keep it alive.
The corpse flower (Rafflesia) is the biggest and baddest and hardest flower to find, tucked into the steep jungled mountain slopes of Sumatra and Borneo. There's a few other plants that smell carcass-y, to attract the carrion flies that pollinate them, like the giant titan arum (Amorphophallus) that does have roots and leaves. It grows from a tuber the size of a car tyre, and can reach over three metres tall (swipe to see it blooming in the third image)
Jade Flower
Carved from solid pieces of precious jade, expertly linked together into long cascading strands up to three metres long - you'd be forgiven for thinking that these flowers are the work of the most talented Oriental craftspeople. Jade vines (Strongylodon macrobotrys) are native to Luzon Island in the Philippines, and mostly grown in botanic gardens here in Australia, as they like in warm and humid. If you go to Cairns you can see this one growing there.The claw-like individual flowers are similar to Lotus or parrot's beak - a golden miniature version and much easier to grow!Glow in the Dark Flowers
Turn off the lights - this one's a spooky treat for after dark!Plants that glow in the dark like radioactive beacons - fact, or fantasy? Fact! Like the purple carnations above, it's the result of genetic modification (not radium injections).
Introducing gene markers from mushrooms (that naturally glow in the dark, because fungi are freaky) makes these flowers light up This bioluminescence has so far been commercially introduced to a petunia called Firefly; other plants are being trialled.
Chocolate Flower
If you have a fondue pot, a block of chocolate, and a steady hand, you could create the flower in the first image... Or you could plant the flower in the second image, which has darkest chocolate-brown flowers - and smells of real chocolate!< It's called chocolate cosmos, and no wonder when we have it in stock it sells out almost immediately.Glass Flower
The amazing artist Dale Chihuly creates spectacular installations of flower-like shapes, all from blown glass.But there is a small white flower that turns to glass every time it rains! The skeleton flower (Diphylleia grayi) has white petals when the weather is fine; and when the rain falls, the petals turn almost completely transparent, like glass. It's native to the high mountains of Japan, where it's called Lotus of Mountain
