Again and again, the saturation or purity of the colour was the most important.Cue in Build Me Up, Buttercup by The Foundations – so build me up, Buttercup doesn’t break my heart! If you love wildflowers, then the buttercup is the one for you. He could now see that not only the wave length of the colours – the green, red or blue tint – or brightness mattered. lies at the intersection of biology and physics. He did this by measuring the light transparency of each layer of the flower – this is the reason that his Ph.D. Van der Kooi researched which aspect of the colour formation is important in increasing the visibility of the flower. Insects find the flower earlier than others due to its saturated yellow color, but the buttercup is not unique in this aspect. The extra light helps the flower to make seeds. Then, it can reflect the light more easily back inside itself.’ In doing so, more light reaches the heart of the flower where the reproductive organs are. ![]() ‘When it is colder, the flower closes a little, like a bowl. ‘The shine produced is greater when the light hits it at a higher angle’, explains Van der Kooi. ![]() Van der Kooi therefore believes that the extra visibility of a buttercup due to its shine is a side effect. ‘Many visual signals which we pick up are invisible for them.’ ‘Insect eyes have a much lower resolution than our eyes’, says Van der Kooi. On the contrary, bumblebees and bees probably cannot see its shine. The shine that we find so pretty does not, however, make the flower more interesting for insects. The result is a deep, saturated yellow and an eye-catching shine. The light which passes through the top layer with the pigment subsequently disperses through the starch granules under the air layer and then goes through the pigment in the top layer a second time. This explains the shine.’įurthermore, the colour of the buttercup is hereby strengthened. Together, these create a kind of film layer, just like oil on water or a bubble. ‘The air layer causes the top layer to become an extremely strong reflector. ![]() ‘That is the where the pigment is, principally.’ Under the top layer, Van der Kooi found a very thin layer of air. ‘You can see that the flower has an extremely smooth top layer – the epidermis’, says Van der Kooi. The buttercup does something very unusual: the pretty colour of the flower turned out to be more than a matter of pigment in the petals that reflects the yellow of the sun and lets the rest of the light through. ReflectorĪ clever move, as he discovered upon closer investigation. ![]() There is no other flower in the whole plant kingdom with the same shiny structure, so it’s no wonder that Van der Kooi cut up the flower and put it under the microscope. His favorite flower? It remains the buttercup, Van der Kooi says, after briefly considering the question the common, bright yellow meadow flower with its characteristic sheen. for his research on the 27th of November. But how do they produce their colours and why? Nobody had thoroughly looked into the matter until Casper van der Kooi got involved. Flowers are all around us – from bright yellow buttercups, to deep red poppies or bright pink Herb Roberts. Buttercups create their colour in a special manner.
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