Pollen
A field journal of pressed gardens.
One quiet garden a day. The same board for every gardener on Earth.
Today’s garden
A fresh page, unpressed.
The five colors.
Five pigments share one wheel: rose, amber, sage, woad, and aubergine. Like neighbors over a garden fence, the colors that sit side by side get along. Plant a bloom touching a friendly color and the two cross-pollinate.
- Madder rose
- Turmeric amber
- Verdigris sage
- Woad blue
- Weld aubergine
Friends
Side by side on the wheel. Set one beside a friendly bloom and they cross-pollinate into a cascade, and each link the bloom makes lifts the multiplier: 1, 3, 6, 10.
Clashers
Two seats apart, and never quite warm to each other. When they touch, the bloom sulks and wilts by 2.
Stone
Old, cross-hatched cells. Nothing grows there, so plant around them.
Nothing to memorize. Every color rests between its two friends, and in play the board lights the welcoming cells for you.
The five seeds.
Every seed carries two things: a color and a shape. The color decides who it befriends. The shape decides where it lands. In your hand each seed wears its own little mark, and when you choose a cell the board lights up the footprint before you commit, so a bloom is never a surprise.
Leaf and Snow have a heading, so you can aim where they point.
Lay your quiet feeders first. Save the showy Sun for last, and drop it where it can greet the most friends at once. That is where the long, bright cascades are born.
It isn’t a puzzle to solve. It’s a garden to grow well.
How a garden cascades.
a pressed specimen, briefly remembering it was alive.
What counts is how many friends a single bloom greets at once. One handshake is quiet. Greet two, three, or four in the same breath and the multiplier swells: ×1, ×3, ×6, ×10. It is never exponential, so plenty of lines stay worth growing.
The cross-hatched cells are stone, and nothing grows there. Everything else stays muted and still. The bloom is the only bright thing on the page, and the only thing that moves.
A bloom that greeted four friends at once, swelling to ×10. That is the whole game.
One garden a day.
Practice as long as you like, then commit. What comes back is a percentile, never a rank: kinder than a leaderboard, and just as honest. Better than 73% of today’s gardeners. A master’s garden, a strong garden, or simply a garden grown.
A kind streak: active, at‑risk, or paused. Never broken, never scolded.
Today’s garden is Plate I. The journal keeps five quieter rooms.
Quiet seals, pressed into the page as you go. Not one of them can be bought. A run begins the day you press your first garden.
Today’s garden is waiting. A fresh page, unpressed.
Join the beta on TestFlight