The Hidden Geometry of Flowers: Living Rhythms, Form and Number

Can we imagine a world without flowers? Flowers are beautiful, offering us delight in their color, fragrance and form, as well as their medicinal benefits. Flowers also speak to us in the language of the plant form itself, as cultural symbols in different societies, and at the highest levels of inspiration.

In this beautiful and original book, renowned thinker and geometrist Keith Critchlow has chosen to focus on an aspect of flowers that has received perhaps the least attention.   This is the flower as teacher of symmetry and geometry (the 'eternal verities', as Plato called them). In this sense, he says, flowers can be treated as sources of remembering -- a way of recalling our own wholeness, as well as awakening our inner power of recognition and consciousness. What is evident in the geometry of the face of a flower 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 within the perspective of our relationship with the natural world. His illuminating study is an attempt to re-engage the human spirit in its intimate relation with all nature.

Professor Keith Critchlow (1933-2020) was a well-known lecturer and author. He was a founder member of RILKO (Research Into Lost Knowledge Organisation), a founder member and Director of Studies of Kairos and a founder member and President of the Temenos Academy. He was Professor Emeritus and founder of the Visual Islamic and Traditional Arts Programme at the Royal College of Art, now the Prince's School of Traditional Arts. His many previous books include Order in Space, Islamic Patterns: An Analytical and Cosmological Approach, Markings: Aerial Views of Sacred Landscapes, Soul as Sphere and Androgyne, and Time Stands Still: New Light on Megalithic Science (Floris Books, 2007).