Someone asked on Reddit how these flowers were made. He spent three hours giving the first open-source answer. 1,500 stars in a week.

Someone on r/LaTeX posted an image and asked how the blue watercolor flowers in the margin were made in LaTeX. The original author wouldn't open-source it. In Oct 30, a developer who knew neither LaTeX nor Lua spent about three hours with Claude building florilegium and replied under the post. That afternoon someone submitted it to Hacker News, and 7 days later it had 1,547 stars. What's worth copying isn't the flowers. It's the playbook: find a "how is this done" that has already been publicly validated and that nobody has open-sourced, and be the first to deliver the answer.

One image and an author who wouldn't open-source it

The story doesn't start with the author. First, a post on r/LaTeX titled "How do you make these flowers in LaTeX," with a screenshot of procedurally generated borders. The original author said they wanted to keep it closed source. In the words relayed on HN, it was "don't want my code picked apart." Someone replied: "The flowers are nice, but not that deep."

Kevin Raymond (kevinraymond on GitHub) saw the post. In the repo's PROCESS.md he wrote that he knew neither LaTeX nor Lua, had no source code, and wanted to see how far AI could go: "Initial planning and release took about three hours." He used the web version of Claude for planning and Claude Code for implementation. He created the repo on Oct 30 07:49 (UTC), released v08:06 on 1.0, and posted the link back under the Reddit thread, promising to explain how it was done.

What it is

A LuaLaTeX package. When a document compiles, Lua computes the curves of every petal, leaf, and stem on the spot and draws them in a Delft-blue watercolor style, written straight into the PDF with no image assets. The flowers respond to the layout: they grow into margin space the body text doesn't use, and they fill the empty space below the last page's text. Each page is a garden determined by a seed. The same seed always produces the same page. Without a seed, printing twice gives two different gardens.

After the blowup the author released several more versions: 2.0 plants and insects sampled from a "genome," a TikZ version for pdfLaTeX, SVG/PostScript output, and a browser playground that works without a TeX install. In November it entered CTAN. It can be dropped straight into Overleaf.

How the stars came

The author didn't submit it to HN. He first appeared in the HN comments on the morning of Oct 31: "I just found out my repo was mentioned (thanks nanna)." The long tail of reposting sites was mostly machines following HN, and the author didn't seed any of them. No paid promotion or big X account retweets were visible.

Forks and stars sit at about 1:35: most people came to look, not to use it.

What HN people were saying

Half the comment section is one word: beautiful, gorgeous, "This is what Knuth made TeX for! art!" One person said, "I've been totally disillusioned with software lately, hating it at work and in life, and seeing something this lovely made me feel a little better."

The other half argued about AI. The fourth comment was simply "Readme is AI. :/", and someone said, "Pretty, but the AI-written text is jarring." The author's response was to publish the entire AI collaboration as PROCESS.md: "Whichever side of AI you're on, I respect it." The argument itself was part of the heat. A "beautiful thing built by AI in three hours" was bound to get people arguing on HN.

Some people went and built their own versions. One user said they had used DeepSeek to turn it into an Obsidian plugin, using note filenames as seeds, "exactly what I've wanted for years of journaling." They posted only a screenshot, no repo.

Why it won, when it wasn't the best-looking

In the same comment section, someone said they preferred the look of the original Reddit image: "Next to that, yours is just okay." In Oct 31, wn-mitch posted tikz-flora, which used a pen-and-ink style with hot-stamped gold and even built a web color mixer. Some on HN said it "looks better." But tikz-flora came 18 hours later, and by 11-06 it had only 99 stars, one-fifteenth of florilegium's.

So the things that won, ranked by weight:

1. The demand already existed. An image people wanted, a public "how is this done," and an original author who wouldn't open-source it. The validation and the first audience were already there.
2. Speed. v1.0 came out in three hours, so the window was basically 24 hours.
3. Instantly understandable and beautiful. Beautiful things are scarce in tech communities, and people who only look will still click a star on the way out.
4. A story to tell. Pure computation has no source material, it borrowed the fill-the-gaps idea from 1998 years of decorative literature, and its seeds are reproducible. That fits HN's taste exactly.
5. The README was built as a picture book: GIFs comparing six seeds, growth-process animations, and a browser playground. The later genome feature, TikZ version, and CTAN entry were all built after the blowup, and their job was to keep people around and hold the "authentic" position.

Who's following

Copycats came fast. Within a week there were: tikz-flora and its TypeScript web version (99 stars), two Typst ports, a XeLaTeX fork, a JS e-book version, a poetry web page, plus that Obsidian plugin that only had a screenshot. florilegium's own README has a section called "Ports and adaptations" that lists them all, which makes it look more like a small ecosystem.

The long-established LaTeX ornament package pgfornament has 196 fixed vector ornament pieces that must be placed by hand and don't grow with the layout. Word and Canva only offer static border templates. Before this, no open-source implementation of "a margin garden that grows on its own during typesetting" existed. Now there are seven or eight within a week.

If it were you

The verdict: Copying a "procedural margin flower" now is too late. What's worth learning is how it got its traction, and running that playbook on a different topic.

Who it's for: developers who code with AI, move fast, and have some taste, and want an open-source project that can hit the HN front page.

Who it's not for: anyone who wants a long-lived tool people keep using. Projects like this get lots of stars and few forks, and the heat fades within a week.

How to do it:

• Watch Reddit, forums, and X for posts asking "how was this made?", ideally with a stunning image where the original author hasn't open-sourced it or hasn't explained the method. Graphics, animation, typography, and generative art, where quality is obvious at a glance, are best.
• Ship a working open-source version with AI within 24 hours and reply under the original post. Make the README a picture book: a GIF of the effect, an animation of the growth or run process, and a browser playground so people can try it without installing anything.
• If you used AI, follow its lead and make the collaboration public, so "the AI built it" becomes a talking point instead of a red flag.
• If you want to build on florilegium itself, the open gaps are: a native version for Obsidian / Notion (people on HN already asked for one), other ornament systems (Islamic geometry, Japanese patterns, Celtic), and personalized print pieces generated from a seed (wedding invitations, poetry books). These might get tens to a few hundred stars, but probably not another 1,500 (inference, based on tikz-flora getting only 99 stars 18 hours later).

How to get users: the first stop is under the original post. The second is HN, but don't count on your own submission landing; florilegium got submitted by someone else. Once it hits HN, daily.dev and the translation sites repost it automatically.

When to move: this topic's window has already closed. For the next "how was this made" post, the window is usually one to two days after it goes up.

What would mean you read it wrong: if you've replied to the original post and written a picture-book README, and you're still under 100 stars three days later, the image wasn't compelling enough, or someone else replied first. Switch to the next topic instead of adding features to the same one.