We do love a good science experiment in our house and spring time is the perfect opportunity to do science with flowers. This flower colour changing experiment is very easy to do and kids will love to see the results!
This flower colour changing experiment does take a little patience. But this will be one of the kids favourites. We had heard about this from a friend but didn’t quite believe it would work for us. So we thought we would give it a try ourselves, and the results were outstanding!
For this experiment all you need is;
- White Flowers (we found that Carnations work best)
- Food colours (as many different colours that you can get)
- Some glasses/cups/test tubes
We only had 4 colours to work with so we had to do a little mixing. My son mixed red and yellow to make the orange, and blue and red to make purple.
Add some water to your glass tube or whatever you are using for your flowers. We had a little flower food packet in with our flowers so I divided the powder into each glass tube.
TIP- I actually think the food helped to get the colour into the flower quicker. But I don’t think you need it.
Cut your stalks right down so that your flowers stand in the water without leaning too much. We actually ended up cutting ours down a bit more the following day.
These were our flowers after 24 hours. They all seemed to be taking the colour in, some faster than others but you could definitely see it working! 😍
Watching & Waiting
My kids kept going over to check on the flowers to see how they were doing. However just leaving them overnight seemed to be enough to get the colours showing.
After 2 days the flowers were starting to look really pretty. The yellow and the purple seemed to take longer to come through. Surprisingly the orange was the most vibrant of all of them. We used 2 colours to make orange so I’m not sure if that had anything to do with it. 🤷🏼♀️
How Do Flowers Drink Water?
Flowers take in water from their stems. They use water to keep their stem, roots and petals healthy. They need water to survive. When the water travels up the stem and to the flower this is called capillary action.
Capillary action is when liquids move through a solid material, like the stalks of the flower. This happens because of 3 forces called cohesion, adhesion and surface tension that all work together to get water and anything that is dissolved into the water, moving.
We loved to see how these flowers were progressing over the next few days. They were starting to look so vibrant.
This will definitely be one experiment that we will do again. We did try it before with white flowers that had yellow centres and we found they didn’t take the colours in as well as this. We were very happy with the results of this experiment. What other ways can you try this experiment?
Taking Your Experiment To The Next Level
- Why not try making your flower multiple colours. Try switching the colour of the water each day, or split the end of the stem and separate into 2 different colours.
- Record your experiment after each day. Which colours took to the petals quicker? Which colours not so much?
- Try doing this experiment with something else that is mostly stem, such as a celery stalk. I have heard lettuce works well too, so this is on our list of to dos!
Have fun! This is definitely one to try with your kids. Its so easy and the kids will love the results. 💐
And here are more fun science experiments for the kids.
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