The Hidden Geometry of Flowers

Can we imagine a world without flowers? Their beauty offers us delight in their color, fragrance, and form, and their substance offers medicinal benefits. Flowers also speak to us in the language of the plant’s form, provide cultural symbols in different cultures, and, at the highest levels, offer inspiration.

In this beautiful and original book, renowned thinker and geometrist Keith Critchlow focuses on an aspect of flowers that has received the least attention. The flower becomes a teacher of symmetry and geometry (the “eternal verities,” as Plato called them). In this sense, Critchlow tells us, we can treat flowers as sources of remembering—ways of recalling our own wholeness, as well as awakening our inner power of recognition and consciousness. What is evident in the geometry of a flower’s face can remind us of the geometry that underlies all existence.

Working from his own flower photographs and with every geometric pattern hand-drawn, the author reviews the role of flowers from the perspective of our interrelationship with the natural world. His illuminating study attempts to re-engage the human spirit in its intimate relation with all nature.

“Keith quotes Silesius at one point, that ‘God is in all things as unity is in all number.’ From this comes the conclusion, surely, that no one organism can grow well and true without it also being mindful and enhancing the well-being of the whole. This is the golden rule of life, expressed through a precise, naturally occurring geometry that reveals the sacred ‘ratio,’ our proper relationship with the whole of creation.” — HRH King Charles III (the foreword)