How this was built

Raising a glasshouse from nothing but code

The Palmhouse is a single HTML file. Every rib, pane, ghost, and droplet is generated at load time. Here is the gardener's method.

The structure

The glasshouse is procedural three.js: eleven wrought-iron ribs are half-TorusGeometry arches with cone-and-orb finials, laced with nine longitudinal purlins and spring-line posts. The vault itself is one open-ended half CylinderGeometry wearing MeshPhysicalMaterial with transmission: 0.92 — real refractive glass, lit by a PMREM room environment so it catches light it was never given.

The ghosts

No plant assets were harmed, or used. Each ghost is a 2D canvas painted at runtime — palm rosettes, fern fronds, and lantern vines drawn with gradient strokes — then mounted on additive-blended planes inside the fog. They sway on individual sine phases and breathe their opacity up and down, which is most of what a ghost does.

The weather

Interior humidity is FogExp2 plus five hundred drifting condensation particles, each a radial-gradient sprite rising on its own seed. The camera never stops moving: a slow dolly on layered sines, steered a little by your pointer. Everything pauses when the tab is hidden and stands still under prefers-reduced-motion.

The archive photograph

The one image in the method section — the east transept in first fog — was generated with Higgsfield's Soul model from a written description of the house, then compressed to WebP. The only asset on the site that wasn't grown from code.

Gardener's notes