Sassafras Sky (Saxifraga album). A tree native to North America.

Young November Sassafras trees, usually standing together in row-like colonies, cut
a unique pattern against the fall sky. Notice that their branching systems have but
three steps of decreasing size, moving from central trunk, to horizontal branch,
to short twig. Trees rarely have a hierarchical structure of more than six steps.
This evidently is an important limit of natural complexity which, remarkably, also
seems to apply to our experience of music, not in space, but in time.





(Photograph was made Sunday, the 3rd of November 2002)