A Japanese plant species with a peculiar leaf pattern recently revealed unexpected insight into how almost all plants control their leaf arrangement. Leaves can be enjoyed for their shade, autumn ...

Pick up a leaf and it is hard not to notice the pattern made by the veins. For years, biologists, mathematicians and even poets and philosophers have tried to decipher the rules and regulations behind ...

The spiral pattern of an Aloe polyphylla plant at the University of California Botanical Garden. Stan Shebs via Wikicommons under CC BY-SA 3.0 To the untrained eye, plants may appear to grow rather ...

Leaf size and venation show remarkable diversity across dicotyledons, and are key determinants of plant adaptation in ecosystems past and present. Here we present global scaling relationships of ...

Next time you go outside, take a minute to look at your local leaf arrangements. You’ll probably notice a few different patterns. In basil plants, each leaf is about 90 degrees — a quarter-turn — from ...

Leaves can be enjoyed for their shade, autumn colors, or taste, and the arrangement of leaves on a plant is a practical way to identify a species. However, the details of how plants control their leaf ...