The Rainbow Garden Project

A coworker once casually told me to “try gardening for fun”. So, naturally, I riffed on this advice and decided to spend the next year engineering a massive rainbow flower pinwheel in my backyard. What followed was a wild ride of deep-dives, hard labor, and unexpected plant-world drama. I’m thrilled to report how it turned out.

The Planning

All of my projects start in Figma and this one is no different. Creating a rainbow pinwheel meant one thing: we needed a LOT of plants. I originally mapped out all the flower circles by hand, but when Figma rolled out their “radial repeat” feature with Figma Draw at Config 2025 I couldn’t resist rebuilding the whole diagram. The result? So much cleaner (check it out below in the Figma embed).

After making the general layout and identifying the colors we needed it was all up to planning with Annie’s Annuals online website. This is our local plant store and it has EVERYTHING. The main goals were to find plants that check as many of these boxes as possible:

1. Perennials — So we don’t have to plant all these plants every year.
2. Drought resistant — More water more money.
3. Deer resistant — We have a very resourceful population of deer we need to defend against.
4. California native — They probably will do better…