Homeschool Science: Put Some Color in a Carnation

Keeping a celery stalk in a glass of colored water was fun enough, but if something is worth doing, then it is absolutely worth over-doing--all in the name of science, of course!

On the way home from a playdate the other day, the girls and I stopped by the grocery store and bought ourselves a small bouquet of white carnations. To home, where I filled more Mason jars up with water and let the girls play another few rounds of color mixing math, and then we trimmed the carnations and popped them in, each carnation in its own jar of colored water:

 Although it takes just hours to begin to see the color change in the leafy celery, we lived with these carnations on the living room table for WEEKS! In a few days, you can see that the xylem have pulled the colored water out to the tips of the carnation's petals:

 
 
 If you can live long enough with your increasingly pitiful-looking cut carnations, however--

--they'll eventually become much more dramatically tinted:

 

The girls loved checking on their carnations several times a day, often plucking a single petal off of one to examine at greater detail with our portable microscope.

I must admit, however, in all honesty, that my absolute favorite part of this experiment was eventually, FINALLY, dumping out the colored carnations onto the compost heap and washing the jars out. When we move houses one day, it's become my dream to have a dedicated schoolroom, a place where ten carnations in jars of colored water can sit happily for six weeks and grow ever more dead and pitiful and not be in anybody's way.