Florilegium grows a different flower garden in the space your document leaves empty

A short final page usually ends in an empty rectangle. Florilegium sees room to plant something. Your document can finish with more growth than the meeting that produced it (a modest target).

The project’s README describes Lua code computing petals, stems, and leaves while the page is written. There are no imported flower pictures to stretch into place. The curves become part of the PDF itself, which makes this an unusually literal example of a document growing on you.

The grown layout fills available space with a greedy loop. It looks for large free circles and grows branches into them, handling big gaps before smaller ones. That gives the decoration information about the page it occupies. A fixed border would keep arriving with the same dimensions regardless of what the text had done.

Reproducible seeds give the apparent spontaneity an address. Reusing a seed produces the same garden, rather than letting every compilation quietly redesign the page. Anyone who has tried to compare two document versions can appreciate a flower that knows when to stay put.

The current README describes plants sampled from botanical trait collections, with recurring species across a document. An aging option changes the season as pages advance. These are deliberate controls: autumn does not have to arrive just because your report took six weeks to approve.

The narrow technical choice worth noticing is how the ornament separates placement from drawing. The growth loop can also place geometric forms or mathematical figures through themes. Finding empty space is one task; deciding what fills it is another. Changing the latter doesn’t require pretending the former was somehow about flowers all along.

This could be charming in a personal booklet, a poem, or a playful handout. A dense operational checklist is a different candidate. A decoration that pushes needed text into a smaller area has started gardening on somebody else’s desk. The wide sample margins are part of the composition, rather than free storage that every existing document already has.

LuaLaTeX is the engine for the package’s text-aware margin layout. Separate TikZ drawings have another route, and the project offers SVG output for other workflows. Those options are worth distinguishing before dropping files into a document and wondering why a different TeX engine refuses to become a greenhouse.

The README includes maker-run timing and file-size comparisons showing that the ornament adds work and output. The flowers have a computational and storage cost. A tiny text-only report and a heavily illustrated report will remain different things even when every picture began as a formula.

For repeated use, the interesting test would be the actual output document: the shortest page, the longest heading, the final page, and the printed result. Repeatable seeds should make an awkward collision easier to reproduce. Whether the prettiest specimen survives your own layout still needs that compile.

Even the footnotes get a garden.