sound insulation texture

Emanuel's Garden

A living family garden book, art directed and led by me, built with an AI coding agent.

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The purpose

My grandpa, Emanuel, came to America from Italy and brought seeds with him, and my family has saved seed from his arugula every season since, for more than a hundred years. What he knew about growing food was passed down by hand, and much of it now lives only in the memories of a few of us. Emanuel's Garden is a private website where the family can gather that knowledge, add to it and keep it for the next generation.

The concept

A garden book in the spirit of an old herbal: parchment pages, ink-and-wash drawings with Italian names in the captions, and plain, warm writing. A Journal holds stories and memories, an Almanac has an entry for each crop, flower, method and pest, Gardeners profiles honor the people, and a Calendar charts sowing and harvest month by month.

The Emanuel's Garden home page on parchment, with a dedication to Grandpa, a hand-drawn sunflower beside the recent journal entries and Almanac links, and a flowering vine along the top and left edges
The home page, with the Flowers garden chosen.

The solution

The archive had to last and be easy for every generation to use. It's a static site built with open-source tools, with every page kept as plain text, so it depends on no single company and costs very little to run. Family members edit from their phones through a simple editor.

  • Drawings for every plant. When a writer adds an Almanac page, an AI model plans the brush strokes in the house style and the site's own code draws them. As admin, I can ask for a redraw with written direction.
  • A garden that moves. Vines grow as each page loads, one shared breeze sways them and the drawings, and now and then a ladybug, bee or butterfly stops by.
  • Vegetables or flowers. Readers choose their garden, and the drawings and colors change to match.
  • Edits as proposals. The family reviews each other's changes, and every page credits its author and contributors.
  • Built for every reader. Light and dark themes, search, layouts for phones held either way, and no motion for anyone who asks their device for less.
The Garlic Almanac page in the dark theme, with a calendar at a glance, growing advice and an ink-and-wash drawing of two garlic plants captioned Aglio
An Almanac page in the dark theme, which follows each reader's device setting. The garlic drawing was redrawn from my written direction.
The Planting Calendar page, a month-by-month table with bars for starting indoors, sowing and harvest or bloom for marigold, sunflower, zinnia, garlic, tomato and zucchini
The Planting Calendar, built from the Almanac pages.
The Zucchini Almanac page on an upright phone, with a compact calendar of colored squares above the zucchini drawing The Zucchini Almanac page on a phone turned sideways, with the full month-by-month calendar for sowing and harvest
On a phone held upright, an Almanac page shows a compact calendar and suggests turning sideways for the full one.

My role

I led the project as art director and lead strategist. I defined the purpose, the audience and the content model, set the visual direction and the voice, and made every call on features, privacy and cost. I reviewed every change before it went live. The code was written by Claude Code, an AI coding agent, under my direction.

The process

I built the site on my Omarchy Linux workstation, with Claude Code a keystroke away, and worked with it the way I'd work with a development team: I brought the brief, the design and the decisions, and it brought the code. The site went live in days. When the animation needed tuning, we measured frame rates on real phones and laptops and fixed what slowed them down. To introduce the site to the family, I designed seed packets of Grandpa's arugula, with a QR code to the site, to hand out at our Christmas party.

What AI made possible

A site like this once needed a team of designers, illustrators and developers, and a budget no family project could justify, so it would never have been built. AI changed that. It let me create something vitally important to my family: a record of what Grandpa knew, ready for the next generation to read, grow and add to.

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