I have read the first chapter so far. Surely because of my ignorance of Goethe's science, I'm finding for the first time concrete descriptions of sensibly perceptible experiences, like plant-matter, that walk the reader to the uncovering of the archetypal principles at play in plant-nature and plant-growth. I hope this is part of what they teach in Waldorf education. This is accessible and 'common' observation - in the sense that one is invited to do nothing extravagant, nothing more than observing the life of common plants - and yet so different from the standard look we normally apply to plant-life and to life in general. Usually we are blind to the visual language spoken by the plant in space and time, the shapes it draws, the gestures it repeats at various phases of its life-cycle with changing gradation, and the 'simple' symbolism enclosed in these movements.
I can imagine a similar invitation is contained in Wachsmuth's book - I haven't read it yet - and I deem this type of education of our sense of sight is a great complement to all plant exercises in Steiner's HTKTHW. Even the bare essential idea of the nature of plant growth in general, as unfolding and radiating out of a spherical ideal space, in the repeated leaf-bud, then in the flower space, as opposed to the 'infolding' type of growth typical in animal life, is such a simple, yet insightful idea, and also unsuspected from the viewpoint of our everyday fragmented apprehension of reality. This doesn't even seem esoteric knowledge. Our sight just needs to be educated away from its incredibly flattened perspective. But the problem is, it's difficult to realize the flat outlook we apply to the world, until a more unifying, living perspective is made possible by guided observations of this sort.
This is definitely the type of insights one starts to crave on a path of living thinking, because they immediately prove their logic and their depth, not in exclusively artistic-intuitive way, not in exclusively rigorous-scientific way, but in a synthetic, profound way that pins down the nature of the experience in all its phenomenological all-rounded-ness, and invigorates both the head and the heart in one single harmonious movement of knowing.
PS: This quality of phenomenological investigation is better described in the beginning of chapter two, in the form of Goethe's perceptive judgment, that is "a perceiving of the truth within the whole, while observing, so as to reach the archetypal picture or Idea, to which the phenomenon relates".