Physicists study lily blossoms

How do flowers bloom? Physicists at Harvard have applied numbers to flowers and found a mathematical formula as well as explanation for why a lily's petals open outward to reveal the bloom within, according to ScienceNews.org.
L. Mahadevan, a physicist who also discovered how the Venus flytrap snaps shut, published findings along with coauthor Haiyi Liang, in the March 21 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The scientists studied asiatic lilies - Lilium casablanca - in the process of blooming and tried to explain why petals curve outward as opposed to inward.
According to Discovery News, some of the earlier explanations for flower blossoms included models involving the midrib - or center vertical line - of each petal.
Mahadevan and his colleagues believe that the driving forces are more along the edges of flower petals.
To prove this, they surgically removed the edges of lilies and found that the outward curls changed, becoming less pronounced.
The team also explains blossoms in terms of "instabilities" in plant cells, according to ScienceNews. Such instabilities arise when some cells become longer than others and begin to strain the edges of flowers. Any flower lover has observed this process at the sight of ruffles along the edges of petals and sepals.
“Because it’s only growing at the edge and not the middle, you get a mismatch of strain," Skotheim told the news source.
To further follow the growth of each flower, Liang and Mahadevan drew dots on the buds of unopened lilies and proceeded to videotape the flowers' growth.
Journalist Tim Wall of Discovery News quotes several writers who may have intuited the process of flower blossoms long before the new publication in PNAS.
"It is at the edge of a petal that love waits," said William Carlos Williams. Similarly, Anais Nin seemed to believe that flower blossoming didn't originate from the center of the bud. "The risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom," wrote Nin.
Mathematicians have used numbers to study and quantify the nature of other plants. The phenomenon of grass blades turning away from the sun has been explained through math.
“Infusing a scientific aesthetic into a thing of beauty only enhances our appreciation of it. This is what we try to do as scientists," Mahadevan told ScienceNews.