Why My YouTube Account's Name Is GardenFlouer
Somewhere out there is a piece of paper with the best cat I have ever drawn on it. I need you to understand that this is not nostalgia inflating the memory. I have drawn many cats since. None of them have come close.
When I was little I read the Warriors series. If you missed it, Warriors is a long-running set of books about clans of wild cats who patrol borders, follow a warrior code, and take their forest politics extremely seriously. I did not just read these books, I absorbed them. And at some point, reading was not enough. I needed my own clan.
So I took a piece of paper and I drew a cat. The cat, as established, was incredible. And a cat that incredible could not just sit there being a drawing. He needed a name, a rank, and a government. I named him GardenFlower, and I made him the leader of his very own clan, FlowerClan.
Now, why a garden? Because at that age I was really, really, really into plants. I want to be precise about the level of commitment here, because "liked plants" does not cover it. Plants were a whole chapter of my personality. Cats were the other one. So the best cat ever drawn received a name that honored both departments at once, which, looking back, was excellent brand amalgamation from someone who could not yet do long division.
A few years later, in 2013, I needed a username for a YouTube account. There was no deliberation. The leader of FlowerClan had been waiting for this moment.
The primary source: me, roughly age twelve, explaining all of this on camera, complete with a live attempt to redraw the cat. The attempt did not go well.
You may have noticed the spelling. GardenFlouer, o-u-e-r. That was not a typo, and it was not an accident. I spelled it that way on purpose, for the single greatest reason a kid has ever had for anything: I thought it looked cool. And here is the thing, I stand by it. Flower is a word. Flouer is a name. I have been defending those letters ever since, one "did you mean GardenFlower?" at a time.
Here is the part that gets me, though. That name turned out to be a prophecy. The kid who loved cats grew up, kept loving cats, and eventually shipped a cat trivia app while being supervised by an actual snowshoe Siamese. The kid who was really into plants grew up and built this website as a literal garden, where posts get planted and grow. Thirteen years and a few hundred videos later, every strange thing I make still fits inside a name I gave to a cat drawing before I fully understood what a username was.
In the original video, twelve-year-old me wraps up by saying he will always remember. He was right about that. He was right about the cat, too.