“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” This is a quote commonly attributed to the legendary actress and philanthropist Audrey Hepburn. To be honest, she has been a great inspiration in creating this application. Of course, much of that comes from her 1990s series Gardens of the World with Audrey Hepburn, in which she explores different types of gardens, such as tropical, floral, and formal. On the other hand, Monty Don has also had an impact, especially through his series Around the World in 80 Gardens.

Nevertheless, who would I be if I didn’t say that a major source of inspiration, particularly when shaping the style and color palette, was the television series Avatar: The Last Airbender, especially Book 2: Earth, where the protagonists travel to the city of Ba Sing Se.

I’d like to explain a bit about how this application was created. At first, I envisioned it as a mobile app, following the line of my previous work, Heritage Soil Station (A Farm in New Zealand). However, due to technical issues, that option became temporarily unfeasible.

The other possibility was to create a website, which certainly made sense, but I chose instead to build a web application. This decision stems from a philosophy more closely tied to writing with code, using languages like Next.js or JavaScript.

First, I made a small collection of images from Pexels featuring five gardens, four from Europe (London, Belfast, the Netherlands, and France) and one from Asia, in Japan. This reminded me a bit of the episode where Audrey talks about Japanese gardens.

Then, I began building the application using VS Code, Node.js, React, Next.js, JavaScript and Tailwind CSS. The app is divided into four sections: Home, Gardens, Tips, and Seasons.

This is the main image of my Home section, where you can also see the navigation bar, which contains links to the other sections of the app.

On the Home page, I decided to include three cards that lead to the different sections of the app.

Regarding my Gardens section, at first I included 5 gardens, but I felt the need to create a 3x3 grid, so I searched for 4 more gardens: in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Singapore, and Mexico. This is a selection of 6 gardens:

What would a Gardens section be without information about each one? By clicking on, for example, Keukenhof, you get a small pop‑up with a short paragraph about the garden.

In the Tips section, you’ll find some advice for creating and maintaining your garden. Here are a few of them:

A couple more tips:

In the Seasons section, we can see what can be planted in each season of the year. By pressing the button corresponding to a season, the background of the section changes color, along with the information, of course.

Spring:

Summer:

Fall:

Winter:

I deployed the website using Git and Vercel. Here is the link of the site: https://world-gardens.vercel.app/

Creating this application was a fantastic and relaxing experience. It was a project that required research, but with inspiration and a peaceful, tranquil philosophy guiding it, the process was truly wonderful. I'll leave you with a video of the Seasons section, showcasing how it changes according to the season chosen.