There’s a leaf arrangement called a “whorl”, that looks like these:

and another arrangement called a “rosette”, that looks like this:

I realized that in one of my Anki decks, I had both but didn’t know if, or why, they were actually different. Well, they are!

The main difference is that in a whorl, all the leaves in the whorl come from the same “node”, or more specifically, the apical meristem, which is the clump of undifferentiated cells that eventually differentiate to become leafs. Since they come from the same one, the leaves tend to be the same size.

In contrast, in a rosette, each leaf comes from its own meristem. Since they’re not growing “synchronously”, they tend to have difference sized leaves (that started growing at different times).

More practically, whorls tend to be off the ground and repeat many times along the stem, while rosettes tend to be right next to the ground, and have only one (but not always).