Thursday, August 4, 2011

Queen Anne's Lace Garden

Tis the season here for Queen Anne's Lace! Most people view this as a weed in their garden....but these lovelies have become one of our flower gardens!  Yes, we don't keep the most manicured lawn or gardens, but my 5 year old loves it! She has been picking Queen Annes for the past couple weeks and we have an ample supply as you can see! This picking resulted in doing the age old experiment with food coloring!  For now here are some endearing pictures of C with these flowers or weeds???


Picking and smelling them!


Bringing her beautiful bouquet to Mom!


We used red, blue, yellow, and green food coloring and water in little bottles Then we put the flowers in the bottles and waited for them to drink the liquid.  C was drinking some juice here and I told her she was drinking just like the flowers would be doing! I don't think her face would turn purple, but then I have heard of people turning orange from drinking too much carrot juice....so who knows?


It didn't take long for the flowers to change colors. The longer you leave them the darker they get! For some reason the red food coloring did not work? I kept putting more food coloring or less of it and nothing seemed to make a difference.  They just wilted over! Has anyone else had this problem with red food coloring?


I'm always amazed with this experiment! I have always been fascinated with Queen Anne's Lace Flowers and loved looking at the little white flowers with the little violet one in the center.  I think there is a story about the violet flower, but I can't remember! (Found it!) Here is a link to the story of Queen Anne's Lace here.


What other flowers have you tried for this experiment?

6 comments:

  1. That's an awesome flower to do that with! I've only really seen it done with carnations! Love this :) We may try it too!

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  2. Awesome Melissa! Thanks for sharing this :)

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  3. How fun to dye them! We have a lot of that flower around, so we'll have to give it a shot.

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  4. A great experiment. It can also be done with celery (leave the leafy party of the celery attached!)

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  5. We've only done this with celery, but JUST picked a bouquet of QAL yesterday and must give this a try!

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  6. great idea! how long does in take for the flowers to change color?

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