Your Garden

Every milestone your streak reaches grows your garden. It starts as a quiet plot of sand, and a year of writing turns it into a complete Japanese garden. We will not spoil what is waiting at the end of that year. Nothing is bought or chosen, and there is nothing to pick. It grows because you kept writing.

Open it from the garden row along the bottom of the streak card on the Progress tab. The row shows the stage you are on, the season, and the picture itself. You can also reach it from the Garden row of the Saved card after you write an entry.

The garden at the still pond, in Fall

The Eight Stages

Your garden grows on eight days: 1, 3, 7, 14, 30, 60, 100 and 365. Each of those adds something to the picture and brings an animal to live in it, and everything stays, so the garden accumulates rather than replaces.

The first one arrives quickly. Write once and the bare plot becomes raked sand with a single stone in it, and a robin.

After that we leave it alone. Onsen will not show you a stage you have not reached, and neither will this page. What the app shows you instead depends on how far off it is:

That is why the how-it-works sheet shows eight dashed circles rather than eight pictures. You get the scale of the thing, which is a year, without being handed the contents of it.

Before your first entry the plot is bare, and still worth a look.

Who Moves In

Every stage brings an animal, and once it arrives it stays for good. The robin comes with your first entry. The rest turn up as you go, and we are not going to list them.

They are somewhere in the picture rather than posed in front of it, so finding one is part of looking. Tap any animal you have to read who it is and the day it arrived.

Who lives here, in the details panel

The Seasons

Your garden wears the current season and changes on its own: Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. There is nothing to unlock and nothing to set. The same stage in snow and in blossom are different pictures, so a garden you earned months ago is worth reopening when the season turns.

Moving Around

The garden fills the screen, with almost nothing on top of it.

• Swipe left and right to move between stages. The dots at the top show where you are.
• Swipe up for the details panel, or tap the hint at the bottom.
• Swipe down to close, or tap in the corner.
• Tap the picture to hide everything and just look at it.

You can always see one stage past the one you have reached, shown locked with a and the line Keep going to see it, so you know something is coming without knowing what.

The Details Panel

Swipe up on any stage and the panel tells you about the picture you are looking at:

• The scene — what this stage is, in a couple of lines.
• Who lives here — one slot per animal. The ones that have arrived are photographs, the rest are dashed rings. Tap any you have to read about it.
• What it is made of — the same again for the parts of the garden. The ones you have are named and tappable; the rest are dashed rings until they arrive.
• Your part in it — your current streak, your longest, and how many residents you have, with a line telling you the streak that grows the garden next.
• A poem — a haiku for that stage, and a different one for each season.

The details panel for a stage

After a Missed Day

A broken streak does not delete anything. Stages you have grown before but do not currently hold turn grey rather than disappearing, with a line that says so: Grown at 30 days, and waiting. Your garden comes back as the streak does. You can still walk through all of them, and they return to full colour as your new streak passes each milestone.

Tips

• Look for the animal — every stage has one, and it is rarely in the middle.
• Check back when the season turns — the same garden in Winter is worth reopening even if your streak has not moved.
• One stage ahead is always visible — locked, so you know a milestone is close without seeing what it brings.
• Day one is the biggest jump — bare sand to a raked garden with a robin in it, for a single journal entry.