Bare soil carries the first argument: nothing about survival demands beauty, yet wildflower meadows keep arranging themselves like curated galleries. Clean color blocks appear where single species dominate patches, because competition, soil chemistry, and seed dispersal cluster individuals into near-monochrome zones that read, to a human eye, like intentional color-field studies.
The harsher claim is this: what looks like restraint is often just constraint. Petal symmetry, radial or bilateral, emerges from developmental genetics and morphogenesis, while pollinator selection fixes only those patterns that maximize contrast under compound-eye vision, so repeating stripes, dots, and rings accumulate until a corolla resembles a studied graphic design exercise framed against negative space.
Even the apparent editing is an illusion. Dense diversity would resemble visual noise, but resource limitation, self-thinning, and niche partitioning prune species counts per square meter, leaving just a few dominant forms and hues; add depth-of-field blur in human vision and camera optics, and a stochastic survival matrix is instantly mistaken for a sparse, deliberate composition hanging in an open-air museum.
