Chemistry – how to color the flowers?

It’s easy to make your own colored flowers. You can use all kind of white flowers, carnations and different daisies, especially. We did our experiment in spring and used snowdrops. Here’s how we did it.

Materials for Colored Flower

• Fresh white flowers
• Food coloring (liquid or paste)
• Warm water, because warm water will be taken more readily than cold water

At first we picked the snowdrops in our garden of course. We have not lot of snowdrops because in Nõmme sandy soil they just don´t grow, so kids could take only 12 flowers.

Children have colored water with food coloring sooner, so they found themselves on the small glasses before I got into the kitchen. We mixed 4 different: blue, green, red and yellow. We use the paste food coloring, just take with tip of match little bit color and mix well. Use warm water because the result will be taken more readily than cold water. If you have time, it is not matter. We had.

Now we set the flowers in the colored water. The petals should become colored after a few hours. It may take as long as 24 hours, however, depending on the flower.

How It Works

A few different processes are involved in plant ‘drinking’ or transpiration. A process referred to as capillary (Capillary action describes the spontaneous flow of a liquid into a narrow tube or porous material). As water evaporates from flowers and leaves, the attractive force between water molecules called cohesion pulls more water along. Water is pulled up through tiny tubes that run up a plant’s stem.

What kind of flowers you would color? I think white tulips, gladioluses and chrysanthemums are also good.