This Page and Pages on The Branching Pattern and Mandalas are : “Under Construction”. This is only a draft, and I will complete them when I can.
I’m not sure when I first became interested in the patterns of Nature, but I suspect that it was probably as a child , when at my Aunties’ house next door to where I lived as a child. Just as I expect most children do, I learnt how to make wax crayon rubbings over coins and leaves and so on.
I liked the leaves best, and one of my favorite things was to look at a very old book which had belonged to my grandfather. It was kept in a locked glass-windowed china cabinet, and I was only allowed to look at it on special occasions. The book was F. Edward Hulme’s Plant Forms, published in 1868 and was probably kept in the cabinet because, even then in the 1940s and 50s, it was sadly deteriorated, with brown spots. The glue on all the pages had dried up and they were no longer attached to the binding.
I learnt a lot about plant form from this book – for instance that the pattern of veins on the leaves seemed to mirror the way the leaves were attached to a stem ( alternate or opposite). I started to collect flowers and ferns and pressed them.
at that point, I was not allowed to get books from the library because there was a polio epidemic!
I was delighted to find this book yesterday in the Internet Archive . If you’d like to look at more of a lovely old book, here is a video made from an original, ( not the one I inherited, which is even more worse for wear!)
It wasn’t until years later in Canada, not until I was at U Vic., when on the last day of the term, a professor, (of Psych, not Biology,!) entertained us with a slideshow of plant photos, that I realized that cameras could actually be used to take wonderful coloured photos of plants. (not just black and white shots on special occasions of family members, often blurry, with part of their heads cut off out of the frame as was usual in my family! 🙂
I’ll pass over the next few years… . I think it was probably in the late 1960’s that books like the Whole Earth Catalog appeared and I became really interested in universal patterns such as the tree as The Tree of Life and circular patterns like Mandalas.
One day someone came to visit and remarked, “I have never been to a house where there are so many mandalas” “ What! ? ”, I answered, surprised, and he pointed out wooden plates carved with folk emblems, copper plates from my family, calendars on the wall, embroideries etc, and I realized, yes these are mandalas. Over the years, I have maintained my interest in universal cultural and natural patterns and I will list some of the books which have been mainstays.
Natural patterns include the following:
Circular: mandala-type patterns. Botanical, these patterns are also seen in religious and cultural patterns and in architecture and art
Branching: botanical, biological (heart, vascular and nervous systems etc),
earth systems such as waterway branching, lightning.
Those are the two patterns which interest me most. Others are
Spirals, Meanders, Cracking, Tessellations, Waves, Bubbles, Stripes.
I hope to do more on these before too long.
Some books on the subject are very detailed. Some go into cultural-historical discussions and even esoteric views, as well as scientific ones. If you would like a short, simple overview, try Wikipedia on Patterns in Nature
Early books that interested me. Now available in paperback.
Peter S. Stevens. PATTERNS IN NATURE Little Brown and Co. 1974
Gyorgy Doczi THE POWER OF LIMITS Shambala 1981
Philip Ball. PATTERNS IN NATURE Oxford Univ, Press 1999. Also in Kindle
David Wade.CRYSTAL AND DRAGON. The Cosmic Dance of Symmetry and Chaos in Nature, Art and Consciousness, Destiny Books, Vermont, 1991. pb 1993.
There are other books on the subject, similar to Wade’s, at Banyen Books.
Three more comprehensive books that may contain too much information for many people (including me when I am tired!) : Philip Ball now has at least 3 separate smaller, books on the same subject as his Patterns in Nature, but in parts, with more detail : Shape, Flow, Branches etc, with more detail.