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During Stanford’s bizzare Full Moon On the Quad, I acquired a beautiful magenta colored rose (and not mono, thankfully). Since that day, the rose has been sitting in a jar of water on my desk, looking a little less lively every day. There were, however, still a few vibrant petals near its center, and so I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to examine and compare the fresh petals with the “dead” ones.

To prepare my samples, I ripped a portion of petal from both a dead looking petal and one that had retained much of the rose’s original color, and prepared microscope slides using a slide, double sided tape, a cover slip, and a couple of drops of water. I tried to rip sections from the middle of both petals, in case the different areas of the petals looked different.

What I noticed, despite the obvious color disparity, was that the two petals actually looked quite similar — I looked first at the live petal and wondered if the little black dots were nuclei, and hypothesized that they might look different in the dead petal, but they look very similar. Unfortunately my foldscope was not able to focus as clearly as I would have liked, so this is a little hard to see in pictures, but I did notice little capsule-like structures around the “nuclei” in the live petal that were absent or much less defined in the dead petal.

It was super cool to look at the same plant in two stages of its life under the foldscope — it makes me curious about what happens biologically when a plant wilts and what changes it goes through.