From The Times - June 3, 2009
Science for kids: Flower power
Help your children to find out about water. They can make flowers change colour overnight just by giving them a drink
By
Eleanor Mills
Laura Mills (4)
and her sister
Alice (6)
conduct
their flower
power
experiment
Flower power
You’ll need...
White-petalled flowers (chrysanthemums and carnations work best)
A knife
Food colouring
Two vases
1. Fill the vases with water. Add a few drops of food colouring. Try different colours.
2. Cut out the stem of each flower diagonally. Then put some flowers in each vase.
3. Now leave the flowers to suck up the water. After 12 hours the petals will change to match the water in the vase!
4. You can even make a flower turn two different colours! Use a knife to cut lengthways down a flower stem, splitting it in two. Make sure that the split goes only halfway up.
Dip each half of the stem in a vase of different coloured water. When you come back later, you'll have a funky two-colour flower Make flowers change colour overnight just by giving them a drink.
The experiment...
“Can water see?” asks Laura, 4. Hmm, bit of an existential question for 8am. Time for a bit of science that was more explainable.
We discuss how water is part of all living things, how it is in our bodies, in plants’ bodies. “How do we know that?” Laura asks. So we embark on the flower experiment to find out. Alice, 6, picks white roses from the garden and daisies from the balcony. We rootle in the cupboard and find green and red food colouring. “How much do we need, Mum?” says Alice, sloshing in the cochineal. What colour do you want your roses? I explain that the more intensely coloured the water becomes, so the colour of our final flowers will be richer because the flowers suck up the water through the stem. Alice reads the instructions carefully: “Mum we need to cut them on the diagonal,”she says, attacking them with relish. Once cut, she puts the stems in the blue liquid and Laura puts hers in red. Then we carefully cut the stem of one flower in half and put half in the blue jar and half in the red.
“What do you think will happen, girls?” I ask. Alice looks at me with six-year-old scorn: “We did it with daffodils in nursery: the one in the blue glass will go blue, the one in the red glass pink.”
Exactly. And what about the one in both? “Perhaps it will make a rainbow,” Laura says. Not quite, but it looks pretty, half blue and half pink. And could the water see? Through rose-tinted spectacles . . .