Abstract
Compositae (daisies, pinecones, asters, sunflowers) have a structure shown in Fig.1. Understanding this structure -one aspect of the field of phyllotaxis (leaf or floret arrangement)1–6- is a problem of crystallography: A surface is tiled with florets (the “atoms”) of roughly the same size, the majority of which are hexagonal (daisy) or rhombus-shaped (sunflower). The unusual feature as far as crystallography is concerned, is that the pattern has cylindrical symmetry. Florets sprout from the central stem (strictly, from a circle, the meristem, surrounding the geometrical center), one after the other, the younger ones pushing out their older siblings. We are dealing therefore with close-packing of deformable florets in cylindrical symmetry.
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Rivier, N., Koch, A.J., Rothen, F. (1991). Crystallography of Composite Flowers: Mode Locking and Dynamical Maps. In: Peliti, L. (eds) Biologically Inspired Physics. NATO ASI Series, vol 263. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9483-0_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9483-0_34
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