No. All of the blue Phals that you see for sale have been dyed. When they rebloom they will revert to their natural color which is usually white, though I have recently seen lavender Phals with blue dye (even more awful). In Japan, a lab created a transgenic blue Phal by incorporating the gene from an unrelated(non orchid) blue flower. It was kept under the watchful eye of a guard at the Tokyo Dome show... would cost thousands of dollars. And I think they only got one plant with fairly good form, the others were distorted mutants. Not something that is likely to ever be available for sale.
But the short answer is, there is no gene for blue coloration of any sort in Phals (or most other orchids, for that matter.) When an orchid is called "blue" or coerulea, it's actually lavender. Any sort of "real" (non-coerulea) blue is very rare in orchids of any sort - a few Dendobium species, the Vandaceous genus Cleisocentron, and the Australian terrestrial genus Thelymitra. The last has many really blue species, but they don't breed with anything else.
Last edited by Roberta; 05-24-2024 at 10:53 PM..
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