Re: Phyllotaxis

Dear Charles,
Getting serious research data on this subject on-line is difficult. 
If you have on-line access to journals, a good place to start is a recent 
review by R.V. Jean in "Mathematical Biosciences" (1995) 127:181-206,
 entitled "Phyllotaxis: the status of the field". If you cannot access 
journals on-line then the best I can suggest is the Journal of 
Computational Biology gopher [gopher://hto-e.usc.edu:70/1] or the 
San Diego Supercomputer Center mathematical biology gopher 
[gopher://osprey.sdsc.edu:70].

Good Luck!