Euphorbia pulvinata rounded in complex fashion

Growing in the open, Euphorbia pulvinata presents its unique, geometrically fascinating pattern of numerous, smoothly aligned stem-tips, similarly sized and shaped. It has qualities of a work of art to all observers that may stop to admire, should they have a modicum of aesthetic sense.

And the plants keep doing the same without deviation over a long lifetime, even if nobody ever arrives to be awed. Dedication to painstaking body building rigours in accordance with the habits of its species includes annual flowering and fruiting as do so many other plants.

In plant world all of this carries on in endless waves of repetition and imperceptible evolutionary diversification, lacking consciousness, purely in order to survive through procreation. The aesthetic feature is incidental, an unintended consequence shaped as growth patterns by probabilistic events in plant genetics, while the admiring aesthete species developed its weird habit as part of own survival attributes.

The continuous elaboration of evolutionary attributes in all that metabolises is the magnum opus of life itself, its singular and integrated art work matched and surpassed only by the vast, inorganic one in the universe of stars, planets and other heavenly phenomena that leave the observing and particularly the thinking species gobsmacked.

Patterns in life on earth and inorganic features of the universe out there deviate from randomness and chaos. It often strikes humanity, the late arrival professing some understanding as beautiful. Beauty, like goodness, is an invention of the human mind, irrelevant where people aren’t present. This means that without people or other beings with sufficient levels of perception and thinking, the world would be equally pretty (or not), but the concept would not exist (Frandsen, 2017; Pooley, 1998; iNaturalist; http://www.llifle.com; https://www.plantbook.co.za; https://worldofsucculents.com).