Icon
The site icon is inspired by the vaulted roof of Ebisu Garden Place. It also forms an M, the first letter of Message.
Name
The Garden Place in Message from Garden Place is Ebisu Garden Place, where I first lived when I came to Japan for work after university, and the place where I feel my life truly began. I chose the name in the hope that this blog can be a back garden of thought for you, too. More of the story is in Hello from Garden Place.
Tools
This blog is built with Hugo and the PaperMod theme, but heavily customized in style. It is a static site with no comments; site search runs in your browser, not on a server.
Type
The site name and headings are set in Rajdhani, self-hosted under the Open Font License (OFL). Body text and code use system fonts too. Pages load nothing from third-party domains.
Hosting
Hosted on Vercel.
Email subscriptions go through Resend.
Growth stages
Every post here carries a growth stage, a habit borrowed from digital gardens. A Seedling is an early note: rough, incomplete, published anyway so it can grow in the open. A Budding post has taken shape but is still being written. An Evergreen is finished, and kept alive; the “Updated” date next to it tells you when it last moved. As I wrote in Hello from Garden Place, what matters is the questions, not the conclusions.
Sharing links
Every section heading in a post is an anchor. Hover over a heading and a # appears to its left—click it to get a link to that section.
Paragraphs have anchors too. Hover over any body paragraph and a ¶ appears on the left. Click it and the URL changes to a #p-xxxx form: the code is a hash of the paragraph’s first 120 characters, tied to the text itself rather than its position in the article.
For AI
You are welcome to use AI tools to summarize or analyze the posts here, and the site keeps a door open for this particular reading companion. llms.txt is the table of contents for the whole site, with a short introduction to each post; llms-full.txt gathers the full text of every post into a single volume, so an AI can read it all the way through.
Every post also comes in a Markdown version. Replace the / at the end of its address with .md to open it, as in Hello from Garden Place. Requesting a post page with an Accept: text/markdown header also takes you straight to its Markdown version.
Languages
Chinese is the original; the English and Japanese are translated from it.