It isn’t all #Gardenindicators in our lab, we’ve been making our own phenolphthalein’s too. They are different colours and pleasingly, all worked well in an acid/base titration. #Chemsky

Further tinned fruit results today, mixing the juice from tinned peaches with bramble extract gives a beautiful purple colour! The left glass contains a mixture of bramble juice, tinned peach juice and water. The right glass contains diluted bramble juice. #Gardenindicators #Chemsky

You have also inspired a new gin and tonic colour! #Gardenindicators

@manhattanscientist.bsky.social has inspired a nice #Gardenindicators experiment! The samples below, all contain Hibiscus tea. L to R, tea, tea with pineapple juice from a tin can, tea with acetic acid and tea with HCl. Those tin ions make a lovely purple complex with anthocyanins!

This seems to becoming a tradition for the end of August. Bramble whisky round 2 now in progress. A double batch this time as well. #Gardenindicators I look forward to the end of November when they will be ready. One jar contains famous grouse, the other is grant’s triple wood blend. #chemsky

Plenty of beautiful
Hydrangeas around St Andrews now. Some will hopefully get used as #Gardenindicators in teaching next year.

I got a nice #Gardenindicators gift this week from
@AlchemistAngus. A can of crushed pineapple! The anthocyanins in blackberry extract can be used to detect dissolved tin(II) ions in the pineapple juice. The anthocyanin/tin complexes give a lovely purple colour! #Chemsky

Cheers for the earlier heads up! This was from near Stirling at 6 pm.

Here is the full set of structures.

We’ve made a lot of phenolphthaleins this year, so here is a multiple phenolphthalein #Chemistree #OChemistree that uses many of the compounds we made. Also featuring an illuminated fluorescein bauble at the top. All planned and made by our lab office team! (not on this platform yet).

I tried a different type of #Gardenindicators experiment earlier this year. I started making bramble whisky in the late summer, this is the finished version after 3 months. Nice colour, quite a sweet taste, a bit like sloe gin. #Chemsky

Thank you very much to @AlchemistAngus (on another platform currently) for this stunning #Gardenindicators specimen. We now have a lab oxalis to join our poinsettia! A video will appear on YouTube soon. #Chemsky

There was a good crop of brambles this year, plenty of fruit for #Gardenindicators experiments. I made "Maraschino" style brambles by soaking them in bisulfite solution, then soaking them in a dye/sugar solution. This process is similar to the method used to make cocktail cherries. #Chemsky

A short video of the boiling methanol containing a small quantity of HCl and the geranium extract.

A few weeks ago, I put about 100 dried red geraniums in a Soxhlet extractor. After an hour or so, hot methanol gave a very rich red anthocyanin-containing extract. Hopefully, some pelargonidin will be isolated from this soon #Gardenindicators #chemsky

One of the things I learned about from #Gardenindicators on the old platform was the Shinoda test for plant flavonoids. Here are rutin and quercetin mixed in HCl and ethanol, then magnesium granules were added. These tests can be very colourful!

I managed to get a poinsettia for # Gardenindicators purposes. Changing the pH leads to colour changes. Some anthocyanin-containing extracts change colour with metal ions too. In this case, alum solution on the left and tin(II) chloride on the right.