Gus Ross

Alice Chmil Biology A

Wildflower Lab Write-Up

In biology we are doing a unit on genetics. We are exploring the different traits in a flower’s

family or how all flowers differ from one another making them different families. Most of the

flowers that I have studied came from my backyard or the woods at SSFS. As I have been

collecting many flowers and noticing all the different traits between flowers, I have created many

scientific questions. Is there a more efficient way to spread offspring? I have seen some that

utilize roots or wind, is one more effective? A second question is that how do flowers know

when to bloom? I see all the flowers now but that is because they bloomed now and will die

later, how do they know when that is? One final question I have is what are the dominant traits in

flowers for color? I want to know so I can look for the lucky flowers that got the recessive gene.

For the project I used many materials and steps to complete it but there were no materials

more important than my eyes and no steps more important than just walking around. I used

Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide to help me identify the flowers as I walked around. I would a few

times a week go around campus looking for wildflowers.

1. When I saw one I would use my key at the start of the book to help figure out the type of

flower I was looking at. How many petals, what is the shape of the leaves, and where are

the leaves where the questions I needed to answer. I would get a code to use to look for in

the table of contents that would correspond to a page.

2. I would then have to just find my flower among those on the pages.

3. Once found I took out paper towels and picked the flower making sure to get basal leaves

if there were some.

 4. I would put the flower in the paper towel and write its name and the page it was on with a

marker onto the paper towel.

5. When I get home, if I ever found some flowers at school that day or in my backyard, I

would add all its information into my google sheets database.

6. After I added information into the database I would take the flowers that were in the

paper towels and lay them under the history textbooks I have at home. (That is where

they would all remain except on the days I have to bring them in and until they get

mounted).

7. When it was time to mount them I had to first create my labels. I did this by importing

my database into a google doc and opening up the Avery extension to make the labels.

8. I then print and cut them out.

9. To mount the flowers what I did was order sticky photo album paper off of Amazon to

put my plants and labels into.

10. I would take my pressed flowers, open up a page, put it on, then put the label on that

page too.

11. I then got my binder and in alphabetical order, from family, put them in. (My sister

helped me with this and also made a beautiful cover for me.)

During this project, there were a couple of ups and downs but in the end, I learned a lot.

The first thing I quickly learned was that you need to properly press flowers. If you do not have

enough force pushing down on the flower then the moisture will just get trapped and your

flowers will mold. Believe it or not, another thing I learned was how to identify flowers. As the

project went on more and more flowers I spotted in the wild I could figure out what they were

without looking them up. I also started to notice patterns within families. They would all be a
certain color or they would all be in a similar habitat. If you look at my followers in my database

under Buttercup, you will see they are all yellow. You could look at Lily’s too and see they all

live in the shady woodlands. You can not learn these things without making mistakes first

though. As I said above, one thing I learned was the need to properly press flowers. This was

probably my biggest mistake throughout the project. I had to recollect sixteen plus flowers. A

second, less major mistake, was misidentifying flowers. At the start of the project, I was still

figuring out how to use the three code number system and would every now and again get the

wrong code for the plant. As more time went on I started memorizing what different codes

looked like and could more easily figure out the codes. A trick to this was going out with my

friends and if I saw a flower I already picked, describe its features. That way when I saw a new

flower I knew what the features on it were called. Now I have already said this twice but it truly

is important; if I could redo this project, I would definitely properly press my flowers. Another

thing I would redo is holding off on the research paper. It is definitely helpful to continually do it

along with the project not in big sections a few times. You lose editing time this way. All these

errors though does not mean the project was a bust though, in fact, there were many great parts.

One is how it brought people closer in a sense. I hung out with friends I usually do not spend a

lot of time with. As shown in my data many of my friend's names are in there along with my

family. I also got to spend a lot more time outside which was nice to escape the classroom

environment. A disappointing factor though was if I was short on flowers and it was a rainy day,

not much you can do there but you still can not advance in the project. One thing that went really

well though was seeing the final result. Seeing my pressed flowers and labels in a binder was

really touching; a sense of completion so to speak.

 Is there a more efficient way to spread offspring? How do flowers know when to bloom?

What are the dominant traits in flowers for color? These are the questions I had at the start of the

project. During my collecting of data and just walking around outside, I have enough information

to roughly answer two of those questions. For the first one, there is clearly a difference in

population between Buttercups and Trillium. This shows that the method for reproduction is

more rapid than that of a trillium. How or why it is? I did not dive deep enough into the subject

to find out. For the second question, I was unable to find an answer during the project. I assume

it has to deal with temperature and time but that is just my current hypothesis. For the third and

final question, the dominant color ranges from family to family but yes, there is one. As

collecting went on I began to notice these patterns. For example in butter cups it is yellow, for

violets it is purple but there is still a great deal of white and yellow violets (unfortunately mine

molded and I could not recover them). So based on my data, I answered two of my three

questions. If I could do this again, I would have two new questions. The first being very specific

in how do buttercups reproduce? I want to figure out what makes them reproduce faster than

Lily’s. Is it the type of root it has or insect it attracts? A second question I would have is what

does the basal leaf add to the flower? Is a flower with a basal leaf able to get more nutrients than

one without? Are flowers with basal leaves around other flowers with basal leaves? Regardless

of these questions, there is a conclusion to be drawn. With my thirty-two flowers in my database,

they are all unique. Sure you can find similarities within a family, but once you get to the flower,

they have clear differences. Whether it be color of the flower, the height of the flower, or shape

of the leave, each species is unique. Through the uniqueness, however, they all have the same

goal and function; reproduction. My observations from walking around show no one flower at a

disadvantage. They all are thriving in their own little habitat. The function of the flower is
designed to allow them to survive in that habitat. So no matter your question, no matter what you

think, each flower has a slightly different adaptation to help them succeed.