Call It What You Will

Call it mandala. Mandala is a sanskrit word meaning “circle” or “encircle.” The mandala symbolizes the cycle of life, nature’s design. It is represented in the cone portion of the Echinacea purpurea and enjoyed by the bees.

Call it Spirographic, or webomatic, or spidergraphic.

Call it Fibonacci. Turtle shells have special mystical significance. The top of the turtle shell or carapace consists of 33 plates or scutes. Five spinal scutes called vertebrals, 8 flanking scutes (4 per side) called pleurals and ringed in by 20 edge scutes called marginals. There is an extra pseudo-scute called the cervical making 21 in all. On the bottom or plastron are six pairs of scutes from head to tail called the gular, humeral, pectoral, abdominal, femoral and anal. The intergulars are very tiny and are part of the gulars. The 5 vertebral scutes and the 8 surrounding pleurals make 13, then add in the 21 scutes around the edge for a total of 34 scutes in all and the sequence follows the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth terms of the Fibonacci Sequence where each succeeding number in the sequence is obtained by adding the previous two (e.g. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, etc).

Fibonacci sequences appear in biological settings, in two consecutive Fibonacci numbers, such as branching in trees, arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruitlets of a pineapple,the flowering of artichoke, an uncurling fern and the arrangement of a pine cone. When one looks very closely into the centers of flowers, especially those daisy types, and with the help of the macro feature of a digital camera, the design is everywhere.

Rudbeckia submentosa ‘Henry Eilers’

Zinnia

Mum and friend

Calendula officinalis ‘Pacific Beauty’

Be it mathematics, mystery or magic, call it what you will, I call it perfection.

Frances