vildi, væri

I had known that the blue rose was a kind of holy grail for the flower set. I even have a hazy memory from early childhood of some movie on television that my parents were watching (this was when I was still too young to have fully absorbed the conventions of small-screen storytelling; I could not follow a television plot) in which the protagonist couple hunted high and low for a fabled blue rose. In fact I don't even remember that much. My dim memory is only of what I presume was the climactic scene, in which someone reached to grasp an artificial-looking flower in (I believe) a cave while half-whispering, half-gasping, "the blue rose ..."

I should hold some sort of contest to reward the person who can identify what movie this was, but said individual should not expect a prize on the order of an actual blue rose.

Apparently, the red iris is a similar mythical, coveted thing. There is something about both flowers -- the classically red rose and the classically blue iris -- being subject to such counterfactural desires that strikes me as ridiculous and sad, like the beautiful brunette who is miserable because she is not blonde having a lunch date with the gorgeous blonde who wants nothing more than to be brunette.

What really is the point of chasing such floral exotica? My favorite roses are a deep red, and my favorite irises a creamy blue. I do not think this makes me the sort of person who settles for the second-best or even (horrors!) the pedestrian. Perhaps my fondness is, in the most literal sense, for the mundane.