What is Lily's Flower Garden?

Lily's Flower Garden is a primarily a tribute to the websites of the late 90s and early 2000s.

My earliest times online were mostly spent surfing through various Pokémon fansites. (I had my own on GeoCities, but sadly it's been lost.) In September of 2013, remembering these old sites for some reason, I went digging through internet archives and backups to find Orson's Pokémon Site, the only one that I could specifically remember.

Shortly after making a post lamenting how the internet lost personality as it moved to social media and content aggregation, I decided to make my own little retro website and began work on Lily's Flower Garden.

It wasn't until a few months later that I found NeoCities and knew it would be the perfect webhost after reading Kyle Drake's article about "making the web fun again".

Lily's Flower Garden isn't meant to be a GeoCities parody. It's a real site with real content that I've put a lot of time and effort into. Most importantly, it's a place where I can put on a ridiculous exaggerated persona and just have fun.

Because sometimes it's nice to have a colorful homemade web site instead of a humorless font of knowledge.

"A lot of people look at geocities and 90’s graphics and anything cyberarchaic with embarrassment. Which is a damn shame because geocities was downright gorgeous. Amateur personal websites are self-made frontier towns. Lovely laboured worlds dedicated to Sailor Moon and Brazilian students studying karate and the diary of a zealous Christian transsexual. They may be part of communities, but they were lone lowfi siteslingers figuring out how to ride first and foremost.

Humanity carved into html. Code ridden bareback.

There’s nothing shameful about that."

Source: dratsing.tumblr.com

Why Lily Blossom?

I've had a weird affinity for Lily Blossom ever since I first saw her. I liked her little toy figurine the most out of the few I collected, and during the two-year break from the show I took after season three she became my overall favorite pony.

An entire website about a single pony that's never been on the show and is rarely acknowledged by the fandom seemed absurd enough for my Web 1.0 project.

Image Credits

Logo sources: Building, Cloud, Bush.

Background and divider line based on Cutie Mark - Blind Bag Lily Blossom.

Cursor based on Botchan-MLP's Lily sprites.