Saturday, May 9, 2009

Botany ~ Leaves and stems: part 2

Celery does a great job of illustrating how water travels up stems. For this experiment we let stems of celery and asparagus sit in colored water for two days. On the first day, we saw a bit of change to the celery leaves, but no change to the asparagus leaves... on the second day, all of the asparagus leaves were tinged red (we put them in red water) and the celery looked like the picture above. The split stem shows exactly where the water travels in the plant.... it is pretty darned amazing! First we studied the leaves and where they were changed, and then I had the kids concentrate on the stems.

Check this out!

Is that not the coolest thing ever? You can SEE the tubes where the celery cells pulled the colored water up to the leaves. Science is so much fun!

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