- Petunia is opening and opening flowers and I look out the window. At the same time, I'm listening to music from Sergei Prokifiev, yes, the opera Romeo and Juliet of the composer born in Sontsivkan of Donets of Ukraine in 1891, based on the homonymous tragedy written by William Shakespeare. Listening and seeing, the famous choreographer Kenneth MacMillan emerged and in 1965 he played for the first time to see the ballet of this opera, in which the unfinished success began, which was applauded for 40 minutes by the public and which caused the curtain to rise 43 times.
The show is beautiful, Russian music, French-language choreography, the history of Italians written by an English and the Portuguese clothing, a perfect example to illustrate European civilisation from east to west. It's a relatively simple dance, but it goes upstairs with costumes, landscape and actors. It demonstrates the importance of these elements in creating a memorable ballet show. Ideal for the flowering of my petunia (Petunia x hybrida or Atkinsian Petunia).
The history of Petunia is similar, the spectacular petunas we know today are a consequence of the accumulation of events of years. Of South American origin, it is hybrid and mother father has the Brazilian dwelling Petunia integrifolia and the white Petunia axillaris from Argentina, but the first hybrids were formed mixed in Europe. Currently, there are many varieties derived from these hybrids, many of them produced by the use of new biotechnologies: transgeny, zinc nucleases and transcriptional genetic silencing by RNA. The history of this last technique begins with Petunia: A team of botanical researchers from the University of Arizona, led by Dr. Rich Jorgensen, intended to enhance the color of some petunas by adding a new gene that produces pigmentation. The result was not encouraging, on the contrary, flowers became white. They realized that the new gene and the petunia gene were sticking together. One left the other and vice versa. This experiment served to discover a new cellular mechanism: the silence of genes. Today it has become a revolutionary technique in our health system, which was awarded in 2006 with the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
Petunia is a kind of relative of tobacco weed (Nicotiana tabacum), hence the name we use. Petunia is based on the Tupi-Guarani languages of South America: tobacco is called “petim” and “pety”.
The flower of the petunia expresses in the language of the flowers irritation, anger, resentment and the city, and being flowers in the form of a trumpet, it seems that it opens up angry words and screams remembering the tragedy of the opera.
Petunia flourishes with a multitude of insects, but the hummingbird sphinx that is not often seen, also makes spectacular dances and melodies characteristic of ballet.