The primordial roses were all yellow, then the evolution (and the selection) gave us the other colors: first the white and, only later, the red.
“The roses are red, the violets are blue“A famous English nursery rhyme begins. Or if you prefer,”red roses for you I bought tonight“, as Massimo Ranieri sang. In short, the association between the rose and the red color is undeniable and we are led to consider all the other colors as anomalies, perhaps selected affixed by millennia of targeted cultivation. Well, a new study published on Nature Plants From a team of the Beijing Forestry University reverses this commonplace, and reveals that in reality The roses, at the beginning of their history, were yellow.
the ancestral rose. The study starts from an analysis of the genome of the Persica Rosaa desert species that lives throughout Asia, from Iran to Siberia. Unlike other varieties and species of rose, the genome of the perch it is free of holes, and allowed to reconstruct not only its origins, but also the evolutionary history of the entire genre Rose.
This analysis in turn made it possible to identify what are the characteristics of the “ancestral rose”, The ancestor of all the existing roses. Starting from its area of origin: China, where the first species of this flower were born which multiplied and conquered the world up to current numbers – 140 species, and 35,000 different cultivars.
With a rose … The ancestral rose, therefore, was yellow and was simpler than the current ones: he had one Single row of petalswhile the multiple ones we see today are probably the result of rare mutations selected by man. The first chromatic variations, according to the study, were the white roses, while those Red and pink came a long laterand they are the result of human selection.
The study also speaks of smells: according to the Chinese team, the roses once they had a much wider variety of fragrances. Over time, however, the flowers have been selected for their resistance to disease and aging, rather than for the perfume, leading to a collapse of the “olfactory” variety. In addition to giving us an idea of how the ancestral rose was made, the study also has practical applications: to know the history of the roses, and their kinship bonds, allows us to protect them and keep them better.
