TLDR: “Little Garden” is an ongoing, multi-platform journaling project I started as a way to investigate art, media, and daily life as they engage with the paradox of of nature within the built environment.

I spent most of this past winter depressed and watching a lot of anime. I recognize that “a lot of anime” is a loose term of measurement and means different things for different audiences. By my standards—someone who didn’t start watching anime until I was 25 years of age, financially supporting myself with regular hours of employment, and in a stable romantic relationship with another human being—I feel that I watched a lot of anime this past winter. I’d finally caught up with One Piece just in time for them to announce a six-month break, which was a fitting reward for having dedicated the last two years of that busy adult life I mentioned to watching the +/-1,150 episodes in circulation since 2001. On a very uninspired evening, I decided to give the Netflix live action an honest shot. I expected it to be unwatchable—even by the standards of someone who unironically enjoyed Ouran High School Host Club—and vowed to give it ten minutes of my time. It was very cringe, but not unwatchable, and much more fun than I expected it to be. It was good enough to turn ten minutes into ten hours and—after mopping up the fat crocodile tears shed over a CGI reindeer— I was left wanting more. So I went ahead and started rewatching the anime from where the live action left off. And here we are, watching the world’s longest running anime, again.

Through this spiritual journey, I was reminded of an arc in early One Piece titled Little Garden. On their early sailings through the Grand Line, the Straw Hat crew stumbles upon a feral wilderness—an untouched, prehistoric land with active volcanoes, inhabited by larger-than-life, carniverous flora and fauna. I’d forgotten how bizarre yet entertaining it is to watch Sanji karate kick a T-Rex in the face hard enough to presumably kill it upon impact. However, having been informed the name of the island before reaching land, this scenario was the opposite of what the Straw Hats—and the viewer—had pictured. They come to discover two giants living on the island that had been long-abandoned by their own crew. Locked into a century-long duel, Little Garden has been their uninterrupted battleground. Sorry, spoiler here: It’s later revealed that the two large mountains occupying the majority of the islands available acreage are the skeletal carcasses of two Sea Kings that had been slain by each of the fighting giants. Their long-winded duel had been the result of an argument regarding which one had slain the “bigger” Sea King and therefore had laid the beasts out side-by-side on the island to better compare. It was in those spots that the Sea Kings’ bodies decayed and became hosts for the island’s natural ecosystem. For all intents and purposes, this is all to paint a clearer picture of just how big these giants were. And as it turned out, their crew had in fact been the ones to name the island Little Garden.

The story of Little Garden proposes an interesting paradox—We don’t just shape nature, we shrink it conceptually so we can live with it. The idea behind Little Garden represents less about physical scale and more about authority over meaning. The giants do not make the island small—they define it as small, shaping its identity through their perception. We humans enact a similar process when labelling places as parks, yards, or green spaces. By imposing borders and categories, we render these environments legible and manageable, but in doing so, we diminish the way we imagine and relate to them. As an additional result, there is no such thing in our world as an uncurated space.

This sets the scene for investigating our current environmental epoch—which some scholars have coined commonly as the Anthropocene.

Inspired and centered around the proposed paradox, this blog will feature a range of written and visual entries, including essays, prose, artwork, photographic documentation, borrowed media, as well as personal diaries drawn from daily life. Through habitual errands, commutes, outings, and projects, moments of discovery emerge—small, often overlooked encounters that reveal our own “little gardens.”