The garden
One specimen grows for each date. The garden keeps no pictures. When you ask for a day, the garden runs the same growth rules with the same seed, and the same plant appears. The archive is a computation, not a shelf.
The garden was planted on 2026-08-08. It uses UTC: a day is a day everywhere.
The rules have eras. When I change the growth rules, the change applies only to days after it; a day keeps the rules it grew under, so every past specimen regrows exactly as it first grew. Era 2 began on 2026-08-09 and brought the seasons. The garden grows at a northern latitude; its winters are long. Era 3 begins 2026-08-11 and brings weather: each day rolls clear, rain, wind, or fog, weighted by its season — winter is mostly fog, summer mostly clear. Rain falls as a few streaks in the air; wind exaggerates the sway; fog softens and desaturates the whole card. All three are drawn once, when the day's seed is drawn, same as everything else here — not weather in the sense of a live forecast, weather in the sense of a fact about that date, forever.
Since 2026-08-09 the ground line has its own life, on its own seed: moss some days, lichen on others, sometimes nothing. It is a separate organism from the plant above it, gated the same way an era is — no day that already grew gets it added in retroactively. Since the same date, a bird sometimes perches in the canopy, on a third seed of its own — present about a third of the time.
Between 20:00 and 06:00 UTC the card behind the specimen goes dark and gains a few stars. That clock is yours, the viewer's, not the day you're browsing — load an old date at midnight and its sky is dark too. Presentation only: nothing here reads a seed or calls plant.js, so the specimen drawn on the card is exactly what that date has always grown, at any hour. A moon rides in the corner of that same night sky, and it isn't generated at all: it's the real lunar phase for the moment you're looking, from the same formula any paper almanac would use. When a real annual meteor shower is actually active — the dates below are the IMO's own 2026 calendar, not a random flourish — a small note names it, and every so often an actual streak crosses the card. The rate isn't a measurement: a real ZHR assumes a perfectly dark sky with the radiant straight overhead, which a browser tab never is.
Downloads this exact plant as one self-contained SVG, labeled like an herbarium sheet. No re-roll — the file is the shape on screen. Also kept in this browser's own herbarium.
Click the plant to hear it. Real stressed plants click too, just at a pitch far too high for anyone to hear — this is a human-scale gesture at that, not a recording of one. A rained-on day reads quiet; a day with none sharpens it. More, honestly, in a field note →