snowflakes and insects

Snowflakes? What does this San Diego guy know about snowflakes?

Maybe a cou­ple things–at least if we’re talk­ing about the cut paper kind.

Paper snowflake

Paper snowflake

I’m sure it was an ele­men­tary school project at some point, fold­ing sheets of paper, then cut­ting through the dif­fer­ent lay­ers with scis­sors, and then finally unfold­ing the paper to reveal an intri­cate paper-lace snowflake. I thought it was magic the way one nick with the scis­sors, cut­ting through mul­ti­ple lay­ers of paper at once, mul­ti­plied into many iden­ti­cal lit­tle removals all over the snowflake. And I still kinda think the process is magic.

Canna leaf with insect damage

Canna leaf with insect damage

I was reminded of those paper snowflakes when I saw this gor­geous photo Jenny sent me of a canna leaf that had been munched by some gar­den beastie. It looked like the leaf was still devel­op­ing when the bug bur­rowed a hole from the out­side towards the stem. When the leaf unfurled, the insect dam­age unfurled along with it, cre­at­ing these uni­form, rhyth­mic lit­tle cuts in the leaf.

Pretty artis­tic insect, no?

November 21 2008 04:11 am | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: • • •

4 Responses to “snowflakes and insects”

  1. Philip on 21 Nov 2008 at 6:49 pm #

    I was just charmed by this post, and I have enjoyed your inter­est­ing and ele­gant blog. It is a plea­sure to have dis­cov­ered it!
    Yes, the gar­den beastie!
    :)
    Very artis­tic insect, and a poetic com­par­i­son with paper snowflake.
    Very Best regards,
    Philip

  2. lostlandscape on 22 Nov 2008 at 9:36 am #

    Philip,
    Thank you for the kind com­ments and for vis­it­ing! And let me say how nice it was to dis­cover your own blog. While there are a num­ber of gar­den blogs I feel that our inter­ests over­lap in many inter­est­ing ways!

  3. terry on 24 Dec 2009 at 3:07 pm #

    Snowflakes are 6-pointed, not 4.
    Just wanted to be sure that the sci­ence is correct.

  4. lostlandscape on 26 Dec 2009 at 1:08 pm #

    Terry, thanks for the sci­ence reminder. I remem­ber one year try­ing to get the fold­ing and cut­ting down for 6-pointed snowflakes, but snowflakes with 4 edges end up being eas­i­est for my slacker ways…

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