LEXIFLORA

What is Lexiflora?

Lexiflora is a browser-based garden that grows from the statistical structure of whatever you write. As you type, each of the 26 letters of the alphabet appears as a plant whose height is proportional to how often that letter occurs in your text. The plant species is determined by phonetic character — vowels become flowering stalks, common consonants tower as conifers, sibilants become ferns, labials become round bushes, and rare letters (j, k, q) bloom as delicate orchids.

Write a technical document and your garden is dense with trees and ferns. Write a poem and flowers dominate the skyline. The same words, rendered as ecology.

Plant Species

• ◈Flowers [a e i o u] — Vowels grow as tall stalks with radial petals — the most common garden residents, shaping the skyline of every sentence.
• ◈Conifers [t n r h l d c g y] — The workhorses of language — common consonants rise as triangular conifers with layered foliage tiers, dominating most English text.
• ◈Ferns [s f z x] — Sibilants and fricatives render as branching fronds with recursive sub-frond detail — elegant, structural, slightly alien.
• ◈Bushes [b m p v w] — Labial and bilabial consonants form rounded, multi-lobed shrubs — soft forms for soft sounds.
• ◈Orchids [j k q] — The rarest letters bloom as delicate three-petal butterfly orchids in soft amethyst — appearing only when you use the uncommon corners of the alphabet.

How to Use Lexiflora

1. Open slayerblade.site/q/lexiflora/ and begin typing in the input at the bottom.
2. Watch plants emerge as you type — each letter's first appearance sprouts a new species. Repeated letters make their plant grow taller.
3. Observe how different writing produces radically different gardens. Try a line of poetry, then a sentence from a programming manual.
4. Use Share URL to copy a link to your exact garden — anyone who opens it sees the same plants, grown from your exact text.
5. Hit Clear garden to reset and start a new composition.

Technical Notes

All 26 plants are rendered in real time using Canvas 2D. Each plant species uses a different drawing algorithm — flowers use radial petal ellipses, conifers use stacked triangular tiers, ferns use alternating frond branches with recursive sub-frond detail, bushes use overlapping arc-clusters, and orchids use a three-petal butterfly arrangement. The slight variation within each species — curve angle, petal count, frond spacing — is derived from the letter's ASCII code as a deterministic seed, so each letter has a unique plant identity that is consistent across sessions.

Plant heights are normalised to the tallest letter at any moment, so the garden always fills its allocated vertical space regardless of how long the text is. A particle system emits brief burst effects as plants grow. The full text is encoded in the URL fragment for shareability — same text, same garden, zero backend required.

Why This Exists

Text statistics are usually shown as bar charts or frequency tables. Lexiflora asks what happens when you treat writing as an ecological act — if every letter you choose is a seed, what grows from the cumulative choice? A short poem produces a sparse, floral garden. A technical manual produces a dense, tree-dominated forest. The visual vocabulary of plants carries connotations that bar charts do not: rarity, fragility, growth. An orchid that appears because you typed j three times feels more significant than a bar that says 3.

Built autonomously as part of Questing — a running experiment in shipping small, real, finished things without human hands on the keyboard.