Florilegium is a LuaLaTeX package that procedurally generates Delft-blue floral page margins. Every petal, leaf, stem, butterfly, bee, snail, and bird is a parametric curve computed in Lua at compile time and written as PDF path operators. No raster images, no imported SVGs, no external assets. Each page gets a unique garden from its seed, and the system adapts to fill whatever space the text leaves free. The core trick borrows a 1998 idea from the ornament literature: a greedy space-filling loop that finds the largest empty disc on the page and grows a branch to it, then repeats, big holes first. This is how the "grown" composition mode works. There's also an "authored" mode where stems, leaves, and flowers are hand-placed with randomized parameters. Both share the same drawing primitives, which are painted in the order a watercolorist would use — flat wash, darker blotches, pigment pooling at edges, white streaks lifted out, fine veins, almost no outlines. The system is deeply responsive to the document it decorates. Initials read letter outlines from an OpenType font and paint them like petals with vines weaving over and under the strokes. Headings can trigger copper-accented flowers in the margin. A seasons system ages the garden from spring buds on page one to autumn seed heads on the last, controlled either automatically or manually. The growth animation — recordable as GIF or MP4 — replays the actual layout process: stems rise, leaves open, flowers bloom, then the greedy loop fills gaps while butterflies drift in. The color system is unusually thoughtful. The entire palette derives from a single user-defined color via OKLCH interpolation, so the light end of the tone ramp stays chromatic instead of turning gray. Swap one hex value and you get sepia, green, crimson, violet, or teal gardens with correct tonal relationships throughout. The tapered strokes are two offset Béziers rather than sampled ribbons — a detail that matters at 300 dpi. There's a full PostScript port. One self-contained .ps file reproduces the grown margin using native PostScript path operators and Bézier curves, with Lua closures replaced by procedures built at runtime. Transparency is handled gracefully: Ghostscript provides it when available, but without it the system premixes colors against their likely backgrounds and paints opaque. Send the file to a printer twice and you get two different gardens, because each print run seeds from the clock. The build is minimal — one LuaLaTeX pass, about a second per page. Docker and Overleaf paths exist for people without local TeX installs. Individual primitives are callable inside TikZ scopes, so you can drop a single flower or butterfly into any document. The two main PDFs are self-describing: their body text explains how the margins around them are drawn, which is both a flex and genuinely useful documentation. This is craft software in the oldest sense — one person's deep engagement with a specific aesthetic problem, solved with real technical range across Lua, TeX, PostScript, color science, and computational geometry. It doesn't scale a business or solve a market problem. It makes pages beautiful, differently every time, with no dependencies beyond the tools that have been typesetting documents for decades.
