Archive for June 18th, 2018

Why do flowers such as roses, peonies, dahlias, delphiniums (etc), exhibit so many shades of colours?

Monday, June 18th, 2018

It was about a year ago that I came across a profusion of colour in my local Park. Although colour in fact was the topic that sparked my interest in chemistry many years ago (the fantastic reds produced by diazocoupling reactions), I had never really tracked down the origin of colours in many flowers. It is of course a vast field. Here I take a look at just one class of molecule responsible for many flower colours, anthocyanidin, this being the sugar-free counterpart of the anthocyanins found in nature.

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