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Why Is Blue Seen So Infrequently In Flowers?

Nature & Animals

26-09-2014 | 09:57

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Why Is Blue Seen So Infrequently In Flowers?

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You would think that blue is just another color in nature's palette, but when it comes to flowers, it's much more complicated than that.

Blue is a color that is rare in nature,” said David Lee, who wrote the book "Nature’s Palette: The Science of Plant Color" before retiring in 2009 as a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Florida International University in Miami. “Less than 10 percent of the 280,000 species of flowering plants produce blue flowers,” he explained.

To make blue flowers, or foliage, plants perform a sort of floral trick with plant pigments called anthocyanins. Health food devotees will likely know anthocyanins because cyanidin-3-glucoside is a strong antioxidant, said Lee. “It is the most common anthocyanin in red leaves and red roses and is sold in the health food trade as C3G.”

The key ingredients for making blue flowers are the red anthocyanin pigments. “Plants tweak, or modify, the red anthocyanin pigments to make blue flowers,” Lee added. “They do this through a variety of modifications involving pH shifts and mixing of pigments, molecules and ions.” These complicated alterations, with reflected light through the pigments, create something that seems so simple: Color!

And the results are spectacular! Delphinums (right), plumbago, bluebells, and some agapanthus, hydrangeas, dayflowers, morning glories and cornflowers.

While we are most familiar with flowers in yellow, orange, red, and purple, the few that are blue don’t seem to deter pollinators. “Insects and birds can detect blue as a wavelength,” Lee said. What they are looking for is a reward — like food — and blue flowers are just as capable of producing that as flowers of other colors.

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