The complete set at Flickr.

Unlike the blue carnation, the blue rose smells – well – like a rose. And – good news for Common Flowers – axillary buds are clearly present.

The Woody Plant Medium is in the post, anyone got any experience with home made medium for tissue-culturing roses?

*clap* *clap* *clap*

(the applause is deafening)

(the audience is listening)

Suntory finally presents: The blue rose.

Yes, we’ve known this for quite a while.

(Georg Tremmel, Illustration of Blue Rose, real Blue Carnation. Complete set at Flickr.)

Nice co-incident, that the flowers start to sell in Japan on Tuesday, November 3rd, this is a national holiday called ‘Culture Day’. Like any other good Culture Day, its purpose is to promote Culture and Art.
We will do our best to turn the “Culture Day” into a “Plant Tissue Culture Day”. I’ll keep you updates on my endevours getting the blue rose and I am seriously considering queueing the night before.

The rose is exactly the reason, why the Common Flowers Project ist called Common Flowers Project and not Common Carnations.
We were aware of the blue rose when we started ComFlow and wanted it to be so inclusive, that we can absorb new flower developments into the ComFlow fold. The nice things about roses are, that they are woody plants and therefore able to survive for years and decades, unlike the carnations, which last for 2 years at most.
Only thing left to do is find a protocol for propagating woody plants, and then it’s off to the queue. I really don’t want to miss this historic event.

Links:

Introducing “SUNTORY blue rose APPLAUSE” World’s First* Blue Roses Available at Last*With petals containing nearly 100% blue pigment

And of course, the “SUNTORY blue rose APPLAUSE” Webpage.

(from the Yomiuri Shinbun on 21. October 2009)

(English-speaking printed press with is usual and predictable 1 day gap: Daily Yomiuri on the 22nd October.)

BCL’s recent work ‘Common Flowers’ was nominated for Nam June Paik Award and will be exhibited in impressionist collection of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne from 26 September until 16 November 2008. The prize will be announced in mid October 2008.

Nominated artists:
• Julia Meltzer and David Thorne (Damaskus/Los Angeles)
• BCL / Shiho Fukuhara & Georg Tremmel (Tokyo/Vienna)
• Attila Csörgo (Budapest)
• Tatiana Blass (São Paulo)
• GIA Grupo de Interferência Ambiental (Salvador de Bahía)
• Johanna Reich (Cologne), Förderpreisträgerin 2006

We will have our ISEA Artist Talk today, Monday 28th July at 4.30 at the Singapore Management University, opposite the National Museum in room SMU SR 2-3.
The official annoucement says, that the talk will be about “Common Flowers – Reverse Engineering, Open Sourcing and Cultural Hacking of GM plants”, but we hope we will also find time to talk about our ISEA AIR project, “Sourcing Water”.

Come along and bring some friends. We bring the food and the drinks. (Well, ISEA is doing that.)