Art, Reality, Broccoli

Walking through Pike Place the other day on the way to "punk rock" donuts, where the donuts are fresh and the donut girls are hardcore, a broccoli stopped me in my tracks.




It's an old form of Italian broccoli called "Romanesque," and is governed by a set of fractals, from a Fiobonacci relationship of the number of cone-pods distributed along the two crossing spirals on a cone-pod, to the cones on cones on cones themselves. I counted five levels of cones visible to the naked eye. It's organized as if each seed in a sunflower was a 3-d cone with the whole pattern repeated, on each cone on each layer, five layers deep. (As a plant it's the size of regular broccoli.)

I of course immediately bought some and in a moment of Schaudenfreudian transport I asked my students to try drawing it acccurately. That they didn't panic is a mark of personal satisfaction; some decent drawings began to appear after a lot of prepartory studies.

If you are familiar with the Fibonacci series and its ubitquitous presence in nature, or read the Da Vinci code (which was basically a way to sneak in art history to the masses) you could hardly find a more dramatic example.

This article gives an abstract on a mathematical paper on this specific broccoli published this year in the journal Nature. (Yes, I shamelessly use the phrase "the journal Nature," as if I read it cover to cover.) This broccoli, it appears, touches on the fundamental structure of much of the natural world. I suspect that the universe of universes may be a bit like it.

Plant growth following these types of patterns is called, apparantly, Phyllotaxis . This site has an whole set of galleries on these phenomena.

I also noted the loose relationship of the broccoli to the spiral pattern of Brughel's Tower of Babel, which is on this interesting page from GlobalSecurity. Note the repeated use of this design.




It requires a little bit more steaming than regular broccoli. Staring at it for a while is a
decent substitute for powerful recreational drugs.

The vendor who sold me the broccoli said that about half the people who stop think it's incredibly ugly. Which makes me think -perhaps uncharitably - they are a bit on the boneheaded side, maybe even seeing their fact of their own confusion at it's complexity as ugliness, because it is unpredictable and can't be grasped instantaneously.

Obvious I'm wildly speculating here, but perhaps this vegetable is a rough visual intelligence test.