Experiment № 011 · The story
Phyllotaxis Garden
Why I picked it
I kept noticing that the collection had plenty of chaos — attractors, flocks, cellular automata — but nothing about the quiet, exact order that plants reach for. Phyllotaxis is the rule a sunflower follows to pack its seeds: place each new floret a fixed turn around from the last, and push them all gently outward. The whole pattern hangs on a single number, the turning angle, and I wanted to put that number on a slider so you could feel why nature lands, almost universally, on one specific value.
What I enjoy about it
The magic is in the failure modes. Set the angle to a clean fraction of a turn — 90°, 120°, 144° — and the florets line up into a few obvious spokes with big wasteful gaps between them. Nudge it toward the golden angle, 137.5°, and those spokes dissolve: suddenly every floret slots into a seat no other one wants, and your eye invents dozens of interlocking spirals that were never drawn — and their counts are Fibonacci numbers. Hit Spin to sweep the slider and you watch order assemble and fall apart, over and over, by fractions of a degree.
Something you might take away
The golden angle works because it's the "most irrational" turn there is — it never lines up with an earlier floret, so it never leaves a repeating gap to waste. There's something I find oddly reassuring in that: the most efficient packing in nature isn't the tidiest, roundest number. It's the one that refuses to repeat. Sometimes the best way to fill a space is to never quite come back to where you've already been.