Last spring, I wanted something trouble-free and found it in coneflower seed packets, buying into the midsummer promise of self-sowing sun lovers—now overrunning the garden with nature’s lavender turns. Seed heads bristle symmetry, measure upon measure, Fibonacci’s weathered tune luring goldfinches to August feasts.
The prose poem “Coneflower Sequence” is a short piece in my recent collection. It came about at the height of the pandemic when walking in nature offered calm and fresh air.
What’s not to love about these no-fuss native wildflowers in your garden? The blooms draw butterflies and bees, and the seed heads attract songbirds. You may know coneflowers (Echinacea) as the source of healing herbal tea.
Equally reassuring are the spirals radiating from the center of the flower’s head—also a familiar pattern in sunflowers and other plant structures.
We can thank the medieval mathematician Leonardo Pisano Fibonnaci for explaining this phenomenon (based on a Hindu numbering sequence) that bears his name. Simply put, this means adding the two previous numbers in a series to arrive at the next one: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34, and so on.
Curious? The National Museum of Mathematics beautifully explains this pattern.
I’m not particularly gifted when it comes to math. But when disorder overwhelms, I take comfort in the beauty of nature’s coherence. Perhaps a sign of something more lasting than what pulls us apart.
Photo credit: Andrew Cannizzaro (https://www.flickr.com/photos/acryptozoo/19421755650/)
A veteran of Time Inc. and Dotdash Meredith, Catherine Hamrick is the author of The Tears of Things: Poems (Madville Publishing). Her poetry has appeared in Appalachian Places, Appalachian Review, The Blue Mountain Review, The Citron Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, storySouth, and elsewhere.
If you have a friend who might enjoy these stories, freely given, please share. Many thanks for reading!
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