A top-notch piece of writing on this plant exists online, so rather than trying to retell the story, I’m going to recommend you visit this page: Fractal Food: Self-Similarity on the Supermarket Shelf by John Walker, founder of Autodesk, Inc. and co-author of the well-known AutoCAD software.

To give a hint of what you’ll find on the article, John’s divided his (released into the public domain) essay into a few parts: The Unclassifiable Romanesco, A Computational Universe?, Stalking the Vegetable with a Camera and Fixing Fractal Food–perfect Botany Photo of the Day fare.