I spent the last couple weeks before finals attempting to get most of my work done. This led me to neglecting my house plants in my dorm. I ended up having my Indian Croton lose a bunch a leaves because of this. I definitely didn't water it as much as I was supposed to (although they don't need a lot of water), but I also left it near the super cold windows. What I noticed over my week or so of rushing in and out of my room, was the leaves on my plant began to change colors. It was a uniform light green, but became a pinkish-purple over time. When I heard we were going to make our own microscope, I thought I'd be a perfect opportunity to look at these fallen leaves in detail



From a naked eye, these leaves look almost uniformly pinkish-purple, but at a microscopic level it has a cool marbling effect with a lot more green than expected. I wonder what causes plants to have different colorations, as well as what causes them to change in response to different climates. My Indian Croton is not native to Princeton NJ, so I wonder how/if the environmental factors influence the coloration of non-native house plants in varied environments. Also, I wonder if color of individual plant cells are associated with a certain level of photosynthetic productivity! Without being able to see this marbling effect, I probably wouldn't have been able to come up with questions like this. Observing everyday items in such a convenient way was a really cool end to my week!

*** I conducted this project as part of Professor Pringle’s EEB321 class at Princeton University ***