What is this?
This is a personal project born out of my own struggles with eco-anxiety and existential despair. It is a response to something I believe I share with a lot of the world today: How does one reconcile witnessing unprecedented levels of grief and loss on the one hand, and impervious apathy and disaffection on the other? Where does all the heartbreak go? The panic about where we're headed?
This project is thus my way of making sense of some of this anxiety and panic. A litany, perhaps. A space where we may process some of this anticipatory grief and maybe commiserate before we have to go back into the world and experience it all over again.
However you choose to engage with this site, I deeply appreciate your time and attention. These are deeply valuable resources and I'm grateful you are here. I hope also that you are well and have access to what you need to be safe and healthy.
This website does not track user data in any form. However, as head gardener, I will routinely weed out harmful and spammy messages, should any appear.
Please direct all feedback and critique to rvu11@pm.me.
FAQ
1. Why a garden?
Gardens are one of the oldest forms of collective care as (often) shared spaces of attention, service, and patience. They are also, historically, political: victory gardens, community gardens as resistance, memorial gardens for the dead. Gardens also hold great personal meaning for me. The idea of an interactive, publicly tended garden thus felt very right for what I wanted to do here: to create a shared space for our anxieties and heartache, to memorialize them through effort and attention, and to try to find solace and community (and perhaps even meaning?) in this collection of honest, unfiltered emotional truths.
2. What is the "pattern" noted in your message on the homepage?
Each note you plant is run through a sentiment analysis model and the dominant emotion your words hold determines what kind of plant grows: its shape, color, size, and density. There are seven native flower types, each corresponding to a broad emotion: fear, sadness, shock, defiance, anger, tenderness, and grief. Over time, a collective emotional pattern may emerge, completely free of curation.
3. How was this site made?
The Last Garden is a mixed-media, AI-augmented effort. All visual assets are digitally handmade. The sentiment analysis uses an open-source emotion classification model from HuggingFace. Claude Code was used extensively to engineer the mechanics: the backend is Python/FastAPI, the frontend is vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, and the site itself is deployed on Railway.
4. How much of my data do you track? What will you do with it?
This website collects zero user data. Absolutely nothing: no cookies, IP addresses, analytics, or any other form of tracking. The only data stored is the text of your message, its emotion scores, and its grid position. I have no way of identifying who planted what. But I can see all messages and will remove hateful or harmful content.
5. What will you do with the notes we've planted? How long will this site be kept alive?
The notes are the garden. I have no plans to use them for anything other than what you see here. They will stay planted where you left them, visible to anyone who visits. I will keep the site running for as long as I am able to. What happens to the collective record after that (whether it gets archived or simply goes dark) is an open question I do not have an answer to just yet.
6. Who are you?
My name is Richa and I'm a graduate student at MIT. You can reach me at rvu11@pm.me.