How Water is Transported in Plants

I bought the cheapest bouquet of white flowers from ASDA (£2!) and put them in a vase at home. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a note of the plant name for future reference. 😅

We talked about why we needed to put them in water (because plants need water to survive!) and why I added the plant food to the water (for nutrients) and why the label said the plants would only stay alive for a maximum of around 8 days (because they had no roots and weren't in soil).

So if they had no roots then how were they able to get water inside them? The water must be able to travel up the stem somehow...

We read about it in a couple of our science books and talked about how the water travels to all different plant parts/structures, i.e. from the roots into the stem and then to the leaves and flowers.

Was there a way we could see if it was true? One of the books mentioned an experiment with celery, so maybe we could do the same thing with our white flowers? There was a reason I chose white flowers to begin with! So the colour change would be more apparent. 😁

We took one of each stem and put them in 4 different glasses. In one glass we filled it with just clear water. In the other three we added red food colouring, blue food colouring, and a mixture of red and blue food colouring to give purple water. We set up the 4 glasses on the windowsill in the morning so we could keep checking on them throughout the day. I also used a whiteboard pen to mark the water level; what did they expect to see happen? The water level should go down as the water's sucked up by the plant!

So what did the girls think would happen to the flowers? What was their prediction? That we would see the flowers change into the same colour as the water in the glass. Why did we have a glass with just clear water? As the control, to make sure the flowers weren't just going to change colour anyway!

After a few hours we didn't see any change, so we decided to leave them for longer. M commented that the water hadn't really gone down at all from the starting lines either!

In the meantime, we watched this video: Ivy's Plant Shop - How does water get from the roots to leaves of a plant? The girls commented their prediction should be correct because the petals in the video changed colour!

We ended up leaving the flowers for a few days while checking on them... The water level went down a little, but the change in the flowers was really mild! I checked online for a possible reason and it turns out that the change in flowers with woody stems takes longer. 😓 But never mind, it just led to more discussions about "failures" in science leading to further experiments and how multiple experiments/repetitions mean more reliable results!