I might have it mixed up, but do flower pedals not have chlorophyll? Or does their chlorophyll absorb green light and reflect other lights? Where do flower pedals get their color from?
In: Biology
There are actually green flowers as well. But these are hard to see among all the leaves and stems. And it kind of defeats the purpose of flowers to attract insects for pollination as these insects do not look for green things but brightly colored things. So you mostly find green flowers in plants that do not require insects for pollination.
Normal flowers though do not have chlorophyll in the petals. The flowers are purely for reproductive reasons and does not collect any energy from the sun. Instead there are various other pigments produced by these plants. It is actually a very common sources of pigments we humans have. For example indigo dye is extracted from indigofera flowers.
Flowers’ purpose isn’t doing photosynthesis, they are created to attract insects for pollination. That’s why they have “guiding” shapes and bright colors.
The flowers don’t do photosynthesis, which is why plant needs a few green leaves before it has the energy to spend on flowers (unless it has massive stores of energy from a parent plant in a bulb or something).
Yes, flowers do not have chlorophyll. Flowers are there to attract pollinators, not photosynthesize. You’ll note that flowers have green leaves and green stems, that’s what does the photosynthesis.
Also, looking at flowers under a UV filter will also reveal more colors because some pollinators like bees can see UV light, so those flowers made UV patterns to attract them
Also, you have the reflection and absorption backwards. Chlorophyll absorbs all light except green, which it scatters, which is why we are able to see them as green because only green light bounces off.
There also exists another pigment for photosynthesis only found in cyanobacteria called phycocyanin, which only reflects blue light and absorbs the other colors. Chlorophyll was more successful in the long run, but cyanobacteria evolved first.
While others explained the chlorophyll part, I will explain the where do they get color part.
Chlorophyll is not floating around randomly inside the cell, it’s contained in little sacks (organelles) called chloroplasts. Chloroplasts can turn into chromoplasts, which are little bags filled with carotenoid pigments, which give yellow, red and orange colors.
Vacuoles are another type of organelle, they are essentially little sacks as well (most organelles are just little sacks haha, inside a larger sack: the cell), and they are used essentially as a warehouse storing all kinds of stuff the cell needs. They can store pigments as well, anthocyanins which have purple and bluish colors and flavonoids, which are yellow.
Oh by the way, the chlorophyll in chloroplasts is contained inside little sacks stacked on each other. Triple sack-ception!
Flower petals usually don’t photosynthesize. Instead, they’re purely for improving reproduction.
Most flower colors come from the same chemicals that make fruits colorful: anthocyanins (red-purple-blue-black colors) and carotenoids (usually red-orange-yellow but sometimes purple too). For those flowers that *are* green, it’s usually chlorophyll doing that. And with anthocyanins, carotenoids, and chlorophyll, you cover basically the whole visible spectrum (and, it turns out, quite a bit of the ultraviolet spectrum as well, which is visible to many pollinating insects and some birds.)
Even actual leaves usually contain non-chlorophyll pigments, though only chlorophyll actually does photosynthesis. You can see these pigments in the fall with deciduous trees. Usually these are also anthocyanins or carotenoids.
There are green flowers, but flower petals are primarily there to get the attention of insects so they come to the flower to pollinate it. Any other color besides green stands out among the sea of green foliage.
And for the most part, no, flower petals do not photosynthesize. However in some cases they do. A few orchid flowers from the Phalaenopsis genus actually turn into proper leaves after their pollination period has finished.
the colors of flowers are primarily from other types of pigments. Anthocyanins are a group of pigments often responsible for red, purple, and pink in plants, while carotenoids tend to provide oranges and yellows and some reds as well. Blues are a bit trickier which is why you don’t see many truly blue flowers or leaves as their are very few true blue pigments in nature, most of the time the plant uses crystal or wax structures or other tricks of the light to create the deception of a blue color.
Flowers aren’t for photosynthesizing, so they don’t need chlorophyll. They need to be bright, contrasting colors so pollinating animals (bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, etc) can find them more easily.
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