The Golden Rectangle and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Successive Golden Rectangles dividing a Golden Rectangle into squares (Hanging Gardens of Babylon by Dutch artist Martin Heemskerck).

Gardens in the sky,
Babylon's wonder and pride,
Lost to sands of time.

A golden rectangle is a rectangle whose side lengths are in the golden ratio, one-to-phi, that is, approximately 1:1.618. A distinctive feature of this shape is that when a square section is removed, the remainder is another golden rectangle, that is, with the same proportions as the first. Square removal can be repeated infinitely, which leads to an approximation of the golden or Fibonacci spiral.

Fibonacci numbers (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34...) are a sequence of numbers named after Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci. The first number of the sequence is 0, the second number is 1, and each subsequent number is equal to the sum of the previous two numbers of the sequence itself.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon / Semiramis (near present-day Al Hillah in Iraq, formerly Babylon) are considered one of the original Seven Wonders of the World. They were built by Nebuchadnezzar II around 600 BCE. He is reported to have constructed the gardens to please his wife, Amytis of Media, who longed for the trees and fragrant plants of her homeland. The gardens were destroyed by several earthquakes after the 2nd century BCE.