Science Experiment #2: Can Flowers Change Colors? (Part 2)

I'm sure you've seen this picture kicking around facebook:

Well, I was curious whether or not it would work, so I figured it would be neat to try.  However, we already had so many mugs of flowers going in the house so I decided to break our experiment up into two parts.  So, we did this part the day after we were done with the first round of flowers.

Supplies:

• some white flowers (we used carnations)
• knife to cut the flowers 
• glasses/mugs
• assorted food coloring
• paper clips

First, put your water and food coloring into your cups/mugs.  We used 5 drops of food coloring again, and the colors were green, yellow, red, neon pink, neon yellow (not green, honest), and blue.

Second, cut the stems if you need to shorten the flowers (also, leave the stem longer than what you will ultimately need for the ones going into more than one color - trust me on this).  Then, for the flowers you are putting into more than one glass of water cut the stem like in the picture above.  Now, I didn't buy roses because they are expensive, so I bought carnations.  These stems were far too thin to cut into quarters, so I cut them in half and put each half into it's own cup.  We only did this with 4 of the 10 flowers.  The other 6 we just put into it's own cup (more on that in a minute).











I want to say, this was a MAJOR pain in the butt.  The picture above shows the flower hanging out hovering above four different cups, completely happy and content with life.  Yeah, not so much.  The stems did NOT like being cut like this, and I had to paper clip them to the cups.  And they didn't like that either.

So, after a couple of days the flowers were changing colors.  It took a little longer for the ones sliced in half, but they changed too.

Now, for the flowers in just one color, after they changed colors we swapped them around so that they all ended up in another glass than the one they started out in.  This has nothing to do with the facebook picture, I was just curious if they would turn into two different colors this way as well as the other.

Final results?  Those placed into two glass DID turn into two colors, just not as vibrantly or strongly as those placed in one cup:

Green and yellow

Blue and neon yellow

And, the one's that were swapped around did get a tinge on the ends of their petals of the second color:

If you look closely, the green one here has a neon pink tinge at the end of the petals.

Now, why leave extra stem for the ones going into two glasses?  Because this killed their stem and the dead part had to be cut off to try and prolong the life of the flower.  The flowers only made it a couple of days before I had to pull them out because they were dying.  The flowers in one color at a time were doing just fine and could of stayed in the cups for a few more days but I felt bad for the half-dead ones so I took them all out to clean up the mess.

The half dead flower that was cut in half.

Final opinion, though?  I wouldn't go slicing up these flowers again.  It almost killed them, and honestly, I felt really bad.  Also, what's the point of doing this if the flowers won't survive the process?

However, overall these two projects showed my kids that yes you can change the color of flowers with food coloring and it also showed them just how water effects plant life.