I've been reading a lot of rose descriptions recently, and it occurs to me that some rosarians believed (or at least tried to sell the idea) that a pink or red rose with a yellow petal base was less likely to 'blue'. I can't say if this was actually true, but I did encounter a few statements to that effect, and I wondered if this accounts for a good many catalog descriptions of reds or pinks having that little assurance that there are yellow or orange petal bases.

I mean, really, who cares about the color of barely seen petal bases in general? A prospective rose buyer might rather want to know a dozen other things about the rose under consideration, but they were told that roses should not 'blue', and I'm guessing this detail was meant to reassure buyers that their neighbors wouldn't sneer at them for buying roses that changed color with age or temperature changes.

Didn't mean to get carried away, but my point was that even a tiny bit of barely noticeable yellow on the petals might, for this reason, get mentioned in a catalog or magazine description, and if your rose otherwise fits the early descriptions and illustrations, the small amount of yellow should not be over-emphasized as a disqualifier.