Sunday, August 07, 2005

Sunflowers, acorn cups, tidying the garden

A vase of freshly cut sunflowers. There are conventional yellow ones and a new dark red variety. The leaves, the petals and the sharply pointed sepals all curl intriguingly, like flames caught in a photograph. I have read that the seeds and petals of sunflowers follow a spiral pattern of growth, which precisely coincides with the mathematical sequence known as the Fibonacci series. In this series each number is the sum of the previous two. It reads 1,1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on.

Little brown rings cover the ground under the oak at the corner of The Grove. They are the cups which supported last year's acorns. The acorns sit in these closely scaled containers, green when new, like eggs in an egg cup.

Cutting back shrubs and plants, which intrude on new growths, and clearing weeds, keeps chaos at bay. The result is controlled chaos - perhaps the definition of a living garden.

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