A Bouquet Of Manmade Colourful Flowers

One evening during dinner... when my son was four.

He was eating and looking at a vase of flowers on the table. The flowers were withering.

Son: Mummy. Why do the flowers look like that? Are they sick?
Me: That's called withering. Something like dying.
Son: Oh, Mummy! You have to take them to the doctor!

I laughed before I explained to him that doctors cannot heal withering flowers. I just couldn't help it.

I regretted not taking a photo of the withering flowers so I could use them for this post but anyway...

At that time, we were doing an experiment on absorption.

We let the flowers "drink" coloured water so we could clearly see changes in the petals that would explain absorption.

**Hubby saw what we did and commented that we were abusing the flowers. 😓😭😭
I have no comment on this remark.***

It was an interesting experiment though, for the children.

Here are some pictures of what we did.

We got some chrysanthemum from a florist. Here, in Malaysia, roses and carnations are quiet pricey. Although they would be better choices for this experiment, we would have to make do with chrysanthemum, which were more easily available here.

We used blue, red and yellow food colouring.

These were the results after six hours. The blue one was the most obvious.

The ones in the red food colouring only showed a little changes in the petals after about 20 hours, with the petals looking a little yellowish.

After four days, the ones in the red water had darker yellow petals while the ones in the yellow water did not show any changes. Most probably the colour was too light to be seen clearly.

We also slit some of the stems into two and did an experiment on both blue and red water. This were the results we got the following day.

We also made another discovery.

The red food colouring was strawberry flavoured and the flowers that were soaked in this colouring smelt like strawberries!

Perhaps you would like to try this experiments too with your children? Anyone wants to make rainbow coloured flowers?

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