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If you want to get up close and personal with blankets of goldfields, Canterbury bells, filaree and other native plants, your best bet is to take a hike.

They got close in 2013, engineering a “bluer-colored” one by splicing in a gene from Canterbury bells, which naturally make blue flowers.

Noda and his colleagues found that genes from the Canterbury bells and butterfly pea altered the molecular structure of the anthocyanin in the chrysanthemum.

Naonobu Noda, a plant biologist at the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, tackled this problem by first putting a gene from a bluish flower called the Canterbury bell into a chrysanthemum.

The flowers last the longest and are brighter than other area species, such as baby blue eyes, arroyo lupine, caterpillar phacelia and Canterbury bells.