Why Your Roses Look Different from Pictures

Recently, roses are opening one after another. Looking at everyone in the sun rose beautiful photos, and then look at their own roses, really want to throw out, simply too ugly, with the publicity photo is too far. What is the reason for this?

Today, we will talk about a newbie flower friends are very concerned about a problem: why they planted roses blooming effect and publicity photos are far from it?

1. The real and ideal rose bloom

Let’s take a look at the rose in the photo above, isn’t it a very spirited bloom? As you can see from the color, it is a blue-violet rose, variety “Blue Story”. Let’s take a look at its publicity photo:

It looks very beautiful, doesn’t it? The flower shape and color are perfect, very blue, very package. But in reality, it’s really, really, really hard for a blue-purple rose to bloom like this. This picture below shows a much closer look at the real thing:

With blue-purple roses, the actual flower color is usually lighter and not as blue. The shade of blue that the picture shows has a lot to do with the camera settings. I have to say that blue-purple roses are indeed a very photogenic variety and look great in pictures.

2. Flower color and shape variations

It’s not just blue-purple roses that can vary in color like this, but many varieties of roses have flower colors that are very much influenced by the environment and change around a lot. Generally speaking, when the temperature is high, the color will be light, especially the soft pink varieties, many of which have straight white flowers in the summer. So, it is normal that we should allow for some fluctuation in the color of roses.

Well, even if there are variations in flower color, what about flower shape? The flower shape can’t vary too much, right?

First of all, we can’t compare the open-flopped, nearly-fallen flowers with the half-open state of the flowers in the publicity photos. There are not many varieties of roses that are still beautiful when turned over. Most European rose varieties are most beautiful when half-open.

3. Influence of seedling robustness

In addition to the differences in condition at different times of opening, the robustness of the rose seedling itself has a direct influence on the degree of standardization of the bloom. If the seedling itself is weak, or if it is a very small seedling, it is quite common for the bloom not to be standardized. Rose first blooms are rarely standardized. Of course, there are many other factors that affect the standardization of rose blooms, which are covered in more detail in my book, How to Raise Exploding Roses from Scratch.

4. How can I tell if a rose seedling is the right version?

So, how exactly do we tell if the rose seedlings we buy are the right version? After all, the first flowers are really so unlike each other. We can start with the following:

Look at other people’s first-flower photos of the same variety

The first thing you can do is to look online for bloom photos of other florists of the same variety. After looking at a few more, you will realize that the original rose can really bloom in a variety of unexpected ways. Your own is still beautiful.

Look for comparative photos with similar degree of openness.

Look for photos of other flower lovers of the same variety with similar degree of openness and compare them. Look at the state of the flower core and petals and compare.

Look for the distinctive features of the variety

If it’s a variety with more distinctive features, then look to see if you have any of those distinctive features on your own flowers. After all, it’s the same genetics, and some of the distinctive features will still show through. For example, the pointed petals of the “Tiffany” flower are visible even if the first flowers are not standardized.