Note: this page has background music -- from the Barry Phillips (no relation) album Trad. To stop the loop, click the pause button (upper left) on the player above, or simply mute your speakers...
Fiddleneck. A satisfyingly fitting name for a relatively unmistakable plant with a flower cluster shaped like the scroll of a violin.
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| Fiddleneck, East Bay Regional Parks, April 2012. |
Although I took these photos last year near Oakland, this plant is currently in bloom in the Presidio.
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| Fiddleneck closeup, East Bay Regional Parks, April 2012. |
But getting back to this shape. An interesting spiral array of flowers, arranged to accommodate many visiting bees at once.
The plant is named after the scroll of a violin, or cello -- but why is the neck of a fiddle shaped this way? I wondered, is there a chance that the fiddle's neck was designed after the shape of this flower?
This may be more interesting to me because I once played violin. (I probably would have gotten better had I spent more time practicing and less time studying the shape of the thing...) But anyway, I found an interesting blog post that gets into scroll design of the viols (violin, viola, cello, and string bass). Is it a tribute to the written word? Is it homage to the Fibonacci sequence? If you're up for a 4-minute video, pause the Barry Phillips and click here -- warning: you may need to watch it 2 or 3 times: Nature by Numbers.
OK. Did that change the way you see the natural world?
Getting back to the necks of fiddles, you may have read in the Fein Violins blog post above that animal heads were often carved into the necks of viols (as in the cello on the Trad album cover). You can find many examples of animal head (often renditions of lions with long tongues and slicked-back hair) scrolls online, maybe even in the string section of your local symphony. And here's something really cool: a cello with a woman's head for a scroll. Now I wonder -- do any plants resemble this?
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