Adventures in Botany Part 2

A few weeks ago I did a post chronicling my attempt to make rainbow roses for Valentines day. It didn’t go quite the way it was supposed to, so me, being the problem solver I am, decided to figure out what went wrong. Sure I could probably Google it, but where’s the fun in that?

I bought another dozen white roses now that the price was a much more reasonable $10 (amazing what a difference a week makes…). Using the same Hard Rock Café shot glasses, I divided the roses into three groups: Indoors near a window, Inside the garage (with little natural light) and outside. Since I had extra roses, I did an additional experiment to see if there was a difference between tap water and filtered water, and I threw plant food in a third, just because.

Color Experiment:

I used a razor and did two separate roses for each room. One with a single dye (Blue) and another split in two, with two dyes (Orange and Green). I decided to use the same colors for each room, which turned out to produce some surprising results.

24 Hours:

24 Hours

According to the You Tube Video, you’re supposed to see some results in a few hours and nearly full colored petals after 24 hours.

The window flowers showed some  slight coloration, but I noticed the leaves seemed to be getting more color than the flowers. I pruned the leaves to see if it made a difference.

The garage flowers also had color, but the flowers were already losing petals.

The outdoor flowers had similar coloring, but looked a bit healthier.

48 Hours:

48 Hours

The 2-color indoor flowers showed significant improvement, and only had a single stray petal. The single blue color, however, seemed to be rapidly killing the flower. It looked horrible and petals were all over the place.

Inside the garage was a similar story, however both of the flowers had petal loss.

Outside had the best results; at least for the two tone. The colors were the best of the three, but I think the direct sunlight dried out the petals a bit. The single blue, looked much worse, however. At some point, the flower fell over, but it shared the same dramatic petal loss.

Different Waters (Side experiment):

Top is filtered. Middle is plant food.
Bottom is tap water.

Since I had a few extra roses, I did a side experiment with different types of water. For some reason, the roses I’ve been purchasing lately haven’t held up as long as the ones I bought 4-5 months ago. It may be because of the time of year, but I wanted to eliminate water from the equation.

I created three separate waters: Tap water, Filtered Water, and Filtered water plus plant food.

Nothing majorly dramatic occurred as a result of this experiment. The tap water rose didn’t seem to open up as much as the filtered water, but the filtered water’s petals were beginning to wilt. Unsurprisingly, the one with the food looked the best, but not by a very wide margin.

Conclusion:

I decided that there was little to gain by continuing this experiment another day. I grabbed the best of the bunch (i.e. the ones still living) and consolidated them into a vase.

The Outdoor flowers seemed to do the best, followed by the indoor flowers. The garage ones had similar color saturation, but the lack of sunlight seems to have sped the demise of the roses. The only issue I noticed was the outdoor ones seemed to be noticeably drier than the indoor and garage ones. Temperature was a non-factor for the most part because the weather outside was very similar to the temp inside.

This was the GOOD blue dye flower

The biggest surprise was the blue food coloring. I dunno what’s in it, but it seems to be toxic to roses. All of the blue roses suffered major petal loss, though interestingly, the garage one suffered the least. Possibly because they drank less because it was cooler/less light in there.

I’d like to have one more stab at this before calling it completely busted. Somehow the people on the internet got it to work. I’m wondering if it’s just not a good batch of roses, or if they’re too “old” by the time I get them. Maybe I can try and find some before they start blooming.

For now, however, it looks like I’m going to have to order them if I want to surprise my girlfriend with rainbow roses next Valentine’s day.

Adventures in Valentine's Day Botany

This Valentines day I tried a little experiment. When I first met my Girlfriend, she texted me a picture of “rainbow roses”. I was fascinated by them. How did they genetically modify these roses so each petal was a different color? It turns out it wasn’t genetic engineering, but food coloring.

Still, I wanted to get a dozen of these for Valentine’s day. They were a little pricy, but I wasn’t too put off by the cost, I was more concerned about the horror stories of people ordering flowers to be delivered and they don’t quite turn out the way the pictures do. Hell, I know people that have received entirely wrong flowers.

So the original plan was to order the flowers a couple days early and hand deliver them on Valentine’s day. I mentioned my plan to my 13 year old daughter and she informed me that you can make them yourself. A quick Google search confirmed this. I decided we’ll go ahead and make them ourselves. Not so much to save money, but I subscribe to the school of thought to where thoughtful/handmade gifts trump store bought ones.

I snuck home early from work a few days before Valentine’s and purchased a dozen white roses (which were mysteriously $7 higher than the week before). My daughter was eager to help, so we watched a You Tube video and went to work.

The trick to rainbow roses is the flowers still “drink” water. If you put food coloring in the water, it’ll make its way up to the flower, and theoretically change the color. So with rainbow roses, you have to get more than one color on each flower.

We cut the rose stems into quarters, which made them very thin and easy to break. Some of the guides do it in sixths, and I can’t imagine doing that.

I tried to find some narrow glasses to put the food coloring/water in, but all I have are pub glasses, which are pretty thick. While pondering the mysteries of life, I remembered my Hard Rock Café shot glass collection, which turned out to be the perfect solution.

Meghan mixed the colors while I finished the flowers. I used a kitchen knife because I couldn’t find our exacto knife. I separated them into bunches of 6 and hid them on my garage workbench. Just in time too, because my girlfriend came home a few minutes later.

You’re supposed to see the colors start changing after a few hours, but I let them sit overnight. I checked them in the morning, but other than a little coloring around the edges, nothing much changed. I figured maybe they needed more sunlight, so I had my son open the garage door at lunchtime, but when I came home, they didn’t change significantly..

Thinking that maybe the stems were sliced too thin, I trimmed them down and split them in two (this time with a razor blade) and tried just two colors. I left them overnight, and found nothing changed (again). Since this was Valentine’s day, I had little choice but to try one last ditch effort to get some color in these things. I placed them individually in only one color and placed them by the window. Since I’m me, and God tends to laugh at my futile attempts at anything plant related, the morning was cloudy, with no sign of sunlight (or meatballs).

Out of time, I gathered them up, and hand delivered them to my Valentine at her work, and took her out to lunch. The flowers didn’t turn out all that special, but at least they had an entertaining story behind them.

(Since I’m pretty stubborn and obsessive about fixing things, I intend on doing more color experiments until I get this right… but, after roses return to their pre-Valentine prices…)