How Does a Rose Bush Get Two Colors?
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Pigments
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Rose flowers create their color through pigments. There are three different kinds of pigments that rose bushes produce, two that are always present and a third, more rare type. The two common pigments are magenta (a dark purple) and yellow colored. The third is a blood red color. These pigments create every color on every rose flower, from vermillion and scarlet to mauve, apricot and primrose.
Just like the pigments used in printing, mixing magenta and yellow can produce a wide variety of shades, given the amounts present. The amount of pigment present will also affect how dark some colors are, what the color saturation is like and how rich the colors look in certain types of light. Add these factors together, and a wide variety of rose colors becomes possible.
This is also one reason why predicting rose colors based on hybrid versions can be a challenge. Pure yellow roses are very low in magenta pigment, but various types of pink or orange roses have delicate balances of the two primary pigments interacting with each other. White roses, of course, have no pigment of either kind, leaving their petals untouched, but gold, vermillion and every type of red are the result of the pigment reactions.
Pigment Behaviors
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The behavior of the pigments explains many oddities in rose bush colors. Rose flowers that are two or more shades are affected not only by this mix of pigments, but by where the rose naturally secretes these pigments when the flower is being made. The first petals that come into contact with sunlight tend to fade to light colors; this leads to variations of shading throughout the flower.
The process also explains why red-colored roses tend to "blue" or turn purplish in color over time. The yellow pigment fades away in sunlight more quickly that the magenta pigment, so flowers that were once red can appear to fade to purplish colors as the yellow pigment leaves. Of course, no truly blue rose exists, because it cannot be made from magenta and yellow combinations, and scientists have had difficulty synthetically replacing those pigment colors with blue varieties.
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Breeding
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Roses secrete pigments based not only on soil, sunlight and weather, but also by encoded DNA information that controls growth and behavior. This explains why roses can be bred together to exchange color properties, and why doing so can be such an inexact science. Sometimes even a single rosebush gives different pigment "orders" to different parts of the plant, leading to different rose colors on a single bush. Interbreeding these roses can lead to many different variations, but growers must always keep an eye on the plant's sustainability and overall health as well.
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