While getting my panier bio at Potager Samson yesterday, a patch of green under the little snow caught my eye in the field near by. It is the Romanesco broccoli (chou Romanesco),previously totally unknown to me. Its very sophisticated and intriguing shape triggered my imagination. It represents a fractal form. I found a great page by John Walker discussing this surprising vegetable and fractal forms. Many thanks to him. I am also including in the gallery six amazing close-up pictures of the Romanesco cabbage from him. http://www.fourmilab.ch/images/Romanesco/
“Fractal forms—complex shapes which look more or less the same at a wide variety of scale factors, are everywhere in nature. From the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation to the coastlines of continents, courses of rivers, clouds in the sky, branches of plants and veins in their leaves, blood vessels in the lung, and the shape of seashells and snowflakes, these fractal or self-similar patterns abound. The self-similarity of most of these patterns is defined only in a statistical sense: while the general “roughness” is about the same at different scales, you can’t extract a segment, blow it up, and find a larger scale segment which it matches precisely.
However, some of the most pleasing patterns in geometric art exhibit exact or almost exact self-similarity. These are patterns which are composed of smaller copies of themselves ad infinitum, or at least until some limit where the similarity breaks down due to the granularity of the underlying material. “
This self-similarity of the Romanesco cabbage makes it a work of art in vegetable form! I really want to create a plaster mold and generate shapes with clay.
I would like to take this opportunity to warmly thank André Samson, Sylvaine Tardif and their team for providing my family with great vegetables.They are celebrating their 10th season of existence this year. Longue vie to the Potager Samson! http://www.potagerandresamson.com/
