Word Garden is a browser tool for growing a sentence into 3D sculpture. You type a short line - up to thirty characters, with a soft nudge that reads keep it short, trust me - and it blooms into individual three-dimensional letters floating in space. Each letter is its own object. Click one and you can translate it, rotate it on any axis, scale it from a tenth of its size up to five times, flip it, undo, redo. A sentence stops being something you read left to right and becomes a small garden you walk around and rearrange.
The surfaces are where it turns lush. Eleven materials - glossy, matte, chrome, liquid metal, frosted glass, ceramic, obsidian, holographic, neon, wireframe, toon - sit over eleven scenes built from shaders. Six fonts, defaulting to Courier. The interface itself is monospace and black on white, a deliberately plain frame around a deliberately gaudy object. When you are done you can set the sculpture spinning and export it as a rotating GIF.
The seed goes back to handwritten notes I made in 2023 - the landscape of words, the spirit of words, the shape and texture of words - written next to a harder question: in a time when machines are eating, replicating, and accelerating language, where does the word stand? Word Garden is one answer. It takes the word out of the sentence and gives it back its body. It treats letters as matter, things with weight and surface and orientation, things you tend rather than read. A small argument that meaning is not only semantic. It is also spatial, tactile, and made by hand, one rotated letter at a time.