Crazy and likely irrelevant tangents, but I've been diving into some math and topology to see if there's anything relevant.

The meanders at the corners can only be aligned if you map the 2D image to a non-orientable surface called a klein bottle

Klein bottles are one of the topological maps that a Game of Life game can take for it's map, along with a torus and some other topologies

John Horton Conway was involved in some great mathematical fields, having a type of notation used in knot theory named after him
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_notation_(knot_theory)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knot_theory

The term Meander also has ties to mathematics, describing a non-self intersecting closed curve
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meander_(mathematics)

I've looked around a bit at meander notation and knot notation without success so far
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_knots

The chess game that has been previously mentioned (that matches the number of ivy leaves) was played against a man with the surname Morphy, by the way.

Also, if each leaf pointing to a chess square is associated with two characters, and each leaf pointing to a flame/lack of flame represents one character, we have enough characters to make a minikey. (29+ the S that is leading by default). Each square could have a different combo based on the board orientation, but some are excluded due to allowable characters in base58 notation. Still though, the permutation space is intractable unless we know the order to put the leaves in.