The papers are arranged chronologically; they include four journal papers from the 1970s, another from the late 1990s, and a preface and book chapter also from the 1990s. Among them, the first is the longest, and reviewer Adhemar Bultheel calls it "the most fundamental"; it uses the idea of "contact pressure" to cause plant parts to maximize their distance from each other and maintain a consistent angle of divergence from each other, and makes connections with the mathematical theories of circle packing and space-filling curves. Subsequent papers refine this theory, make additional connections for instance to the theory of continued fractions, and provide a more general overview.
