how do flowers get their color?
“Is it their petals when they keep flapping and squiggling in the wind they get their color?”
“Is it their little stuff inside the middle of the flowers?”
“Giving it lots of different kinds of foods?”
What kind of food? What do you think will happen?
“If I put a white flower in pink lemonade, I think that it will turn pink.”
Did any of the flowers get color from the drinks we gave them?
“Yes. The ones that had the food coloring in; that’s the ones that did get their color."
Did all of the flowers get color?
“No. The ones that drank juices like lemonade and grapefruit juice and grape juice, they did not get their color.”
So, sometimes flowers can get color through their stems?
“Yes. But not always. Sometimes they don’t.”
What happened to the flowers in the food coloring?
‘The food coloring got sucked up with the water and came out [evaporated] through their petals. It’s called transpiration. It means that flowers suck up water up from their stem.”
But wait! Don’t flowers usually drink water?
"Yes!"
Is there food coloring in the rain or in the ground water?
"No!"
So how do the pink flowers get pink and the purple flowers get purple?
Flowers have different chemicals called pigments (colors) inside them. Just like people and other living things, different flowers have different genes (like building blocks) that determine (decide) what pigments they will have.
When light shines on a flower, it reflects into our eyes. The reflected light shows us the flower’s color.
Colors can look different when the amount of light changes. At night, a pink flower’s color might look different than it does in the morning.
My genes are like my Mom’s and Dad’s. “I’ve got peach skin, and I’ve got brown eyes and I’ve got red lips. In pansies I see bluish, purplish, white and yellow and black.”
guess whose science fair project is going to district?!
love it.
ReplyDeleteOh, Krispa. You's a scientist, too!
ReplyDelete