This press grows a plant by one rule repeated over and over: every branch sprouts two smaller branches, each turned by the same angle and shortened by the same ratio. Change the two knobs and you rewrite the whole species at once.
Because the rule repeats at every scale, a single branch is a shrunken copy of the entire plant — that is self-similarity, the signature of a fractal.
How much space does it fill? Lay a grid over the specimen and count the occupied boxes; shrink the boxes and count again. If the count doubles when the boxes halve, it is a line (dimension 1); if it quadruples, a filled sheet (dimension 2). The slope of that log-log count is the box-counting dimension.
A real plant lives between: keep more length at each split and the canopy fills space faster, pushing the dimension up from 1 toward 2 — never quite either.
The press slipped mid-pressing. The lesson continues without it — nothing you have grown is lost.