The Hidden Geometry of Flowers: Living Rhythms, Form and Number, Paperback - Keith Critchlow

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.

About the Author:

Professor Keith Critchlow is a well-known lecturer and author. He is 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 is 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).