Tide Garden

Tide Garden

Nothing here waits to be asked. A sheet of paper takes two broad washes of water, a seabed, boulders and shingle, and then the garden grows on it: holdfasts first and far off, then fronds, fans, wrack and anemones, each one nearer, darker and heavier than the last, until the plate is full. The tide then comes over the whole window as five thin veils of paper, the last garden sinks into a faint underpainting, and the next one starts on top of it. Every other sheet is a clean one.

The specimens are drawn, not stamped. Each is a small growth system — a stipe bending into a current that itself turns all sitting, blades set alternately along it, dichotomous forks that halve as they rise, a fan branching five deep, tentacles curling out of a wash. The species on any sheet are chosen and named when the sheet begins, so the caption below the window is a real index: it counts what has actually been painted, and fills in as you watch.

Everything on the paper is p5.brush, a natural-media library for p5.js: translucent marker nibs whose colour mixes where two fronds cross, a fine hair line for pinnae and tentacles, spray for silt and spores, hatching for shells and urchins, and watercolour fills for the water itself. Over it sits a plain 2-D layer running at full frame rate — the suspended motes drifting in the water, the mount, the running head and the caption.

Control	Effect
Pace	Specimens per second, held against the clock rather than the frame rate — about one, two and a half, or six
Water	Auto cycles Rockpool → Kelp Forest → Cold Water → Coral Ground with each new sheet; pick one to hold it
Pause	Stops the brush; the motes settle too
Fresh sheet	Clears the paper and starts a new garden immediately
Save PNG	Writes the plate as it stands at 2400 × 1500, painting and lettering composited

The sheet stops painting while it is scrolled out of view, and picks up where it left off when it comes back.