Horticulture, Aesthetics-driven evolution
The flowers, which are systems for the reproduction, show diverse morphological variety generated under the natural selection. On the other hand, human beings have domesticated them for their ornamental values, and have created a lot of variations which have novel features.
In this process, people chose some plants based on their aesthetic judgments and hybridize them to create "desirable" flowers. There is no difference from the process of evolution from the view of Darwinian theory. Therefore, the horticulture means a kind of facilitation of the evolution under artificial selection pressure. This selection process can be affected by aesthetic/cultural factors. In my research project, I am investigating this "evolutionary" processes to improve ornamental values. My targets are mainly the waterlilies Nymphaea closely associated with a famous series of paintings by Claude Monet.
Theoretical morphology
My research focuses on analysis of morphology. The theoretical morphological model is used for the analysis. This expresses the shape of the flower with mathematical formulas and makes it possible to express various shapes by changing the parameters. Although the form to be visualized does not necessarily exist in reality, various calculations can be performed on the actual flower structure by manipulating the “possible shapes”. In practice, analysis may be performed in combination with measurements obtained by measuring real flowers. The current goal is to develop a platform that can freely analyze the structure of a complex water lily flower.
Semantic control of Theoretical model with description for flowers
Many parameters are required to reproduce the characteristics of a real flower in a theoretical morphological model, but there is a dilemma that the handling of the model becomes complicated as the parameters increase. One way to solve this is to combine the parameters well and represent the flower morphology with fewer parameters. I am studying a method to reduce parameters in the model while capturing the characteristics of flowers by using descriptions in gardening catalogues.
