Messing with Daffodils

Avery sent in photos of his daffodil experiment.
Before:
Avery before

After:

Can you see the difference? How did he manage to add those pretty colors to the flowers?
Thank you for sharing the results of your experiments with us, Avery!

This is the time of year to see daffodils.

Everywhere.

Too many, in my opinion.

Don't get me wrong; I like daffodils. They're cheerful. They help announce the arrival of spring and the promise warm, sunny days ahead. They certainly don't hurt anyone.

But right now there's so darn many of them that, let's face it, they get a little monotonous, (which is a fancy word for Booorrrring!).

I wonder if we can make them a little more interesting.

Here's a daffodil that my wife picked and brought into our home the other day. The shape is unusual, but the color is typical run-off-the-mill, daffodil yellow:

I wondered if I could make it look more interesting. So instead of just sticking it into a vase of water, I put some water in a bowl, added blue food coloring, trimmed the stem a little and set the daffodil in the bowl.

Here's what I saw the next morning:
Yellow nest day

I left it in the bowl one more day, and it looked like this:
Yellow day two

Now really, isn't this more interesting? How do you think all those green dots got there?

I thought I'd try experimenting some more.

I took another daffodil, this one with a more typical shape, but very pale yellow, almost white in color:
White before

And I did an experiment with it. This is what I ended up with:
White after

Notice that there is some red, some blue, and even a little bit of purple in a few places.
How do you think I did this?

So here's my challenge: see if you can use water and some food coloring to add some more color to a daffodil. If you don't have access to your own daffodills (and your neighbor has a particularly mean dog), try this with a different flower.

Can you figure out how I turned my white daffodil both red in some places and blue in others?

Try some experiments on your own. Send photos of your set up and your results to gsimonelli@leffellschool.org so that I can publish them on this page.