During many of my talks with Mr. Ralph Moore, my most important mentor in rose breeding, he would talk about creation having it's origins in God's imagination: that before God created, He first imagined His creation. Mr. Moore believed that mankind, being created in God's image, naturally needed to use imagination in the same way: that he or she needed to first be able to clearly envision in his or her own mind the thing being made or invented, before they could ever hope for it to happen.
Many rose lovers have voiced that they would not be interested in a blue rose, saying things like, it would be gaudy or unnatural, or that it wouldn't fit in with the landscape. Whenever I thought of a blue rose, for some reason, I always thought of it being a dark blue color. In my imagination, a dark blue rose was never as beautiful as a dark red rose. As such, the quest for the blue rose had never been very strong for me.