The city’s air system. It filters, and each morning it announces a scent: today, Summer BBQ with a Hint of Jasmine. Nobody asked for the scent. The week it sagged, everyone noticed how much shade they had been living under.

A seed scattered rather than stored. Copying with acknowledgment is a gift economy: you credit the original, then you copy it, and the method outgrows its makers on purpose.

Also called Scalable Sustainability.

A plant with glass tendrils that drinks the sun all day and lets it go as warmth after dark. You can read by one if you are patient, and warm your hands if you are not.

Flood the tray, let it drain, do it again: a planter’s tide. In The Verdant Veil a message is hidden in how the nutrients rise and fall, and Lex reads it off the interface.

Made to be gone: a ring of leaves on the creek, a wall of cardboard cubes that will not see the winter. Andy Goldsworthy’s trade, and the city’s for an afternoon.

Austin, a few decades on: the same creek, the same bridge at dusk, a few more vines than the zoning allows. Everything here happens to people who are trying, and are not always right.

The chill that follows when a hologram’s light goes through fog: cold on the teeth, then a taste like a coin from childhood. It is gone before you can ask what it was.

A Little Free Library stocked and kept by staff of the Austin American-Statesman and the Texas Book Festival. The shelving needs some repairs, and the stewards say so plainly.

No one sleeps under the bridges now. The houses float, tethered to footings along the creek, and the city says it is solved. Joe, on a bench, says there is a second kind of homeless, the kind that happens inside a house, and it is a different kind of work.

A story you can stand inside. The Jejune Institute did it on the streets of San Francisco for three years; here it is done with a planter that has a number. The costume is optional.

A flyer from 1983: bands nobody has heard of, Octavia Butler listed as keynote, a coffee ring on the edge. Either a festival that happened or an infection that spreads like pollen. The archive does not say which.

The weather on the nights the paper lanterns go up: light hanging in fragile things, swaying between celebration and remembrance. A woman under the Congress Bridge carries one made of grocery paper and inked wishes, and waits for a footpath that only opens when enough people need it.

Plants that eat attention and breathe out ornament. They glow green at boasting and amber at humility, and the block learns how little humility it had stored. Nobody chose them. We posted about it.

An owl cut from endless bands of metal stands across from the Central Library, a sculpture made from all the leftover hours. People pass it carrying something they would rather set down.

The cooperative that keeps the gardens, the stories and the van. Nora Sanchez started it, and whoever tends it owns a share. The name is a leaf turned over.

The first cohort of ReLeaf, scattered now. In the rehearsal years, when the first gardens were being tuned on rooftops and bus stops, they staged concerts with soda tabs for cymbals and mulch for reverb.

A low vibration underfoot when the mycelium network recognizes you, and a faint light on the footbridge that follows your step. It is not an alert. It says: here you are.

A garden that grows up instead of out: cans, wicks, a strip of cloth for water. It is the plain thing ReLeaf does, and the thing most of the stories hang on. Mrs. Delgado’s is the one the neighbors ask about.