VS Code Flowers

A calm pixel-art garden that lives in your editor. It grows with real elapsed time, or blooms permanently if you would rather just have flowers.

Current release: 0.2.0

Using it

The garden appears in two places — the Flowers icon in the Activity Bar, and a Flowers tab in the bottom panel (⌘J / Ctrl+J), next to Terminal. Both show the same garden.

Everything else is behind the Customise button in the corner of the garden.

Garden modes

• 🌱 Growing — plants move through Seed → Sprout → Young plant → Bud → Bloom over real elapsed time, whether or not VS Code is open.
• 🌸 Always Blooming — plants are shown fully grown, with no waiting.

Switching modes never disturbs your planting.

Growth speed

Roughly one day (Fast), three days (Normal, the default) or seven days (Slow) from seed to bloom.

Plants

Pick any combination; the bed is filled from what you choose, with taller species toward the back. Choose exactly one species and it is shown as a potted plant on a windowsill instead of a bed.

• Flower Garden — daisy, sunflower, tulip, lavender, bluebell, pansy, hyacinth, foxglove, allium, baby's breath, marigold, cosmos
• Succulent Garden — echeveria, aloe, haworthia, jade, cactus
• Autumn Garden — chrysanthemum, aster, rudbeckia, sedum, pumpkin, fountain grass, goldenrod, maple sapling

Each biome remembers its own planting, so switching back restores what you had.

Watering

Watering darkens the soil and nudges growth along a little. It is capped and rate-limited, so it cannot be used to rush a plant, and nothing ever dies from neglect.

Wildlife

Ambient creatures occasionally wander through — a butterfly over the meadow, a tarantula or gecko across the desert, a squirrel darting through the autumn bed or a crow crossing its sky. They are decorative: nothing to feed, collect or click. Set to Off, Occasional (default) or Frequent, and suppressed entirely under reduced-motion settings.

In the Autumn Garden, leaves drift down behind the plants. The same setting controls them: none when Off, a few when Occasional, a steady fall when Frequent. Like the creatures, they stop under reduced-motion settings and don't appear in the potted-plant view.

The Autumn Garden has two extra switches of its own:

• ☀️ Day / 🌙 Night: at night a full moon rises among the stars and the garden dims. Bats come out, and the daytime creatures go to sleep.
• Plain / 🎃 Spooky: by day this just lights jack-o'-lanterns along the fence. After dark it goes all in: fog rolls through, tombstones stand along the fence, a bare tree claws at the moon, and a scarecrow keeps watch. A witch sweeps past on her broomstick, a ghost drifts over the bed, and a vampire or a werewolf may stalk along the front of it (the werewolf stops to howl).

The potted-plant view is always plain daytime.

Development

• npm run compile — compile TypeScript
• npm test — compile and run the state and message-boundary tests
• npm run watch — compile as files change
• F5 — launch an Extension Development Host

A dev-only fast-growth toggle appears in the Customise panel when running in the Extension Development Host; it runs a full lifecycle in about 45 seconds and never appears in an installed build.