Colouring Flowers – Science Experiment

I saw this experiment a little while ago, but have had trouble finding white flowers until now.
At Woolworths, while getting some groceries, they had a trolley with buy 1 get 1 free flowers on it. The pack I got had purple flowers and these great white flowers that we used for this experiment. 

 

 

What you need:

white flowers – carnations work the best
cups / vases
warm water
food colouring
scissorsLine up your cups / vases and 1/2 fill with water.

Cut the stems of the flowers to make them shorter, so they don’t fall out of the cups.
Make sure it is a slanted cut so the flowers can bring up more water.

Add food colouring to the cups. I used about 25 drops for 1/2 cup of warm water.

Warm water will be taken on more readily by the flowers.

The petals should start to change colour within a few hours.

We left our flowers for 24 hours. I think we probably needed a bit more food colouring or maybe they needed more time to drink up the coloured water.

You could also split a stem and put each stem into different coloured water. The stems on our flowers were not big enough to do this.

To see how it works go to Steve Spangler Science

Linking to:

We Made That
Teach Beside Me
True Aim Education
The Educators Spin On It