Blue Chrysanthemums, Anyone?

I remembered seeing blue chrysanthemums at some flower shops a long time ago. I knew there weren't any blue species around for chrysanthemum but it did not trigger me to find out how they were produced until recently when I came across a post on one of the many pages I Liked on Facebook that shared an interesting experiment on absorption. In that experiment, roses were used. It was mentioned  that this test works particular well on roses and carnations but they are quiet pricy here where we live so we decided to try with chrysanthemum instead.

We got our flowers last Friday and did the experiment. 

We used blue, red and yellow food colouring. 

This was the result after six hours. The flowers in the blue food colouring were obviously blue while the yellow and red food colouring still looked white.  

The flowers in the red food colouring looked a little yellowish after 20 hours or so but the ones in the yellow food colouring still looked the same. 

This is the result after four days. The flowers in the yellow food colouring finally showed some difference and looked a bit yellowish while the ones in red food colouring looked a little more yellowish. It never became red. 

Then we did another experiment where we slit the stem of the flowers into two and put them in two different colours - blue and red. 

We also tried out using green food colouring. 

This was what we observed the following day. Two of the flowers turned blue while the rest remained the same. 

The red food colouring was strawberry flavoured and so, some of the flowers also smelt like strawberries!