This Valentines day I tried a little experiment. When I
first met my Girlfriend, she texted me a picture of “rainbow roses”. I was
fascinated by them. How did they genetically modify these roses so each petal
was a different color? It turns out it wasn’t genetic engineering, but food
coloring.
Still, I wanted to get a dozen of these for Valentine’s day.
They were a little pricy, but I wasn’t too put off by the cost, I was more
concerned about the horror stories of people ordering flowers to be delivered
and they don’t quite turn out the way the pictures do. Hell, I know people that
have received entirely wrong flowers.
So the original plan was to order the flowers a couple days
early and hand deliver them on Valentine’s day. I mentioned my plan to my 13
year old daughter and she informed me that you can make them yourself. A quick
Google search confirmed this. I decided we’ll go ahead and make them ourselves.
Not so much to save money, but I subscribe to the school of thought to where
thoughtful/handmade gifts trump store bought ones.
I snuck home early from work a few days before Valentine’s
and purchased a dozen white roses (which were mysteriously $7 higher than the
week before). My daughter was eager to help, so we watched a You Tube video and
went to work.
The trick to rainbow roses is the flowers still “drink”
water. If you put food coloring in the water, it’ll make its way up to the
flower, and theoretically change the color. So with rainbow roses, you have to
get more than one color on each flower.
We cut the rose stems into quarters, which made them very
thin and easy to break. Some of the guides do it in sixths, and I can’t imagine
doing that.
I tried to find some narrow glasses to put the food
coloring/water in, but all I have are pub glasses, which are pretty thick.
While pondering the mysteries of life, I remembered my Hard Rock Café shot
glass collection, which turned out to be the perfect solution.
Meghan mixed the colors while I finished the flowers. I used
a kitchen knife because I couldn’t find our exacto knife. I separated them into
bunches of 6 and hid them on my garage workbench. Just in time too, because my
girlfriend came home a few minutes later.
You’re supposed to see the colors start changing after a few
hours, but I let them sit overnight. I checked them in the morning, but other
than a little coloring around the edges, nothing much changed. I figured maybe
they needed more sunlight, so I had my son open the garage door at lunchtime,
but when I came home, they didn’t change significantly..
Thinking that maybe the stems were sliced too thin, I
trimmed them down and split them in two (this time with a razor blade) and
tried just two colors. I left them overnight, and found nothing changed
(again). Since this was Valentine’s day, I had little choice but to try one
last ditch effort to get some color in these things. I placed them individually
in only one color and placed them by the window. Since I’m me, and God tends to
laugh at my futile attempts at anything plant related, the morning was cloudy,
with no sign of sunlight (or meatballs).
Out of time, I gathered them up, and hand delivered them to
my Valentine at her work, and took her out to lunch. The flowers didn’t turn
out all that special, but at least they had an entertaining story behind them.
(Since I’m pretty stubborn and obsessive about fixing
things, I intend on doing more color experiments until I get this right… but,
after roses return to their pre-Valentine prices…)
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