Cycle of Learning - The Enigma Emporium Season Two - Trial by Cipher - The REAL Card Two

Welcome back to a two-card binge of Enigma Emporium's second season - Cycle of Learning - and the first set in that series - Trial By Cipher, in which we attempt to gain access to the mysterious Infiniti Institute with our sleuthing skills. Maybe not off to such a great start, as my puzzling partner and I apparently accidentally did cards two and three out of order, and weren't able to check our answers on the website. Oops! Being stubborn cryptographers, we opted to do two cards in a night - a wild weekend indeed! So, behold, the solving of the REAL card two....

On the front, we have "The Patterns of Nature Help Us Find Understanding" in front of a bunch of different spiral images. Think the Golden Mean or Fibonacci sequences. Snail shells, Sunflower inflorescences... It's not a direct quote from anything we can find, but we get the picture... On the reverse we have an encoded message on the left and what looks on first glance to be Pi to an unreasonable length, but which we expect will have 'errors' that spell the real message. As to stamps, we have three this time - Carrots (64), Tree Roots (25), Ginger (9).  

We divide and conquer. My partner takes Pi while I look at the message, another cryptoquip, presumably. I like those :) Off we go!

We were right - there were numbers in 'Pi' that didn't fit. They were: 26 64 84 9 97 92 40 98 2 08. Not seeing a pattern, but then we look at the numbers they replace: 14 21 13 5 18 15 12 15 7 25. NUMEROLOGY. 

I'm still stuck on the message. Patterns of Nature aren't helping in this case. I give up on the cryptoquip idea, leftover from the last/next card, and start attacking the puzzle... mathematically. And then I start laughing rather maniacally. It's a nested Caesar, based on the Fibonacci sequence - 1 1 2 3 5 but then thankfully loops around, making it easier for me to run it on dCode so I don't have to scribble everywhere:

Mathematics is not solely the study of abstract equations. Moreso it is a lens by which to understand reality itself. Amedeo Alessandro

Ok, so far we have Numerology as the department, presumably led by Amedeo Alessandro. We still lack a location and a year, but based on the prior puzzles, I'm willing to bet that the year is 853, based on the roots of the stamps. Still, need a location. My puzzling partner looks at the shapes and realized that, based on the sides, we get 2178414. That gets a shipping company in WA, truck parts, MLS numbers in Las Vegas... Looking at the differences, we get 161433, which is a nice dark blue in RGB. Probably not what they're going for. Trying to find ways to make this a zip code.And then I realize we're making this far too hard on ourselves. At A=1, we get Baghdad. 

We plug our answers into the application page, and we are correct! And then we go check our answers for what turns out to have been the third puzzle... just in case...