I want to share my thoughts with you about an app I’ve been using that I think has really exciting potential for gardeners. It’s called One Second Every Day (1SE) and, no, I’m not getting paid to tell you about it. But I think you might find it really handy. Or just loads of fun. Essentially, it could give you the opportunity to watch your garden grow (or just about anything grow) in a new way.

1SE is actually a video diary app. How user-friendly is it? I’ve been messing around with it enough to make a couple of videos that I’m really happy with and I basically just downloaded the thing and started taking photos and adding them. I’ve made a couple of videos, each created over the course of a year, and I’m blown away at how watching them reminds me of how incredibly full our lives really are. But, I’m intrigued by how you could use the app to capture the life, so to speak, of a plant or a garden or a place.

A moving portrait of a place

One of the simplest projects you can do on the app is compile a slideshow-style video.

Above, a screenshot of my cell phone with the 1SE app showing a video of wildflowers I found on the Bruce Peninsula during the summer of 2022.

It took me all of 20 minutes to scroll through all the wildflower photos I had taken during the summer of 2022 and create a 27-second-long video. What struck me about the result (below) is that seeing all those wildflowers, some caught in a breeze, appearing in one flowing parade of colour from May through September made me appreciate just how abundant and diverse the wildflowers of the Bruce Peninsula.

Capturing the subtle glories of a garden

One of the details I love about this app is that the date each photo was taken subtly appears in the image. You might have noticed that the wildflowers in the video shown above were shot in clumps of time. Which makes sense. I don’t take photos of wildflowers every day.

Appreciating one’s garden often comes to the same thing–we tend to really enjoy the full wonder of our little personal paradises in clumps of time. A long meander on a spring morning, a rare chance to linger over a morning coffee on the patio, a quiet moment you’ve carved out of the your schedule to sit and relax on a warm fall evening. Almost all other days, our gardens are the backdrops to a blur of tasks, errands and activities.

So I figure that using the 1SE app or any similar video diary app (there are plenty on offer) could be a way to un-clump the wonder of your garden. I used the “Freestyle” format in 1SE to make the wildflowers video. In the “Journal” format, you can add a photo or bit of video to every calendar day, hence the inspiration for One Second Every Day. I found the app became a subtle prompt to take that photo or video every day. (And, by the way, you can use Live photos or snippets of videos from 1 second to upwards of 5 seconds long.) What you wind up with at the end of your year or season or whatever your chosen length of time is a remarkable video of what’s really happening–a non-stop dance of growth and change.

Discovering the slowest of beauties around you

Stop motion movies have fascinated me ever since I fell in love with Wallace And Gromit. Getting an inanimate object to spring to life is pretty much magic. Well, with a video diary app like 1SE, you could apply the stop motion movie idea to capturing those elusive garden dances that are imperceptible to our daily gaze. For instance, this coming spring you could take a snap of your spring flowering bulb bed every day at the same time from the same position. What you would wind up with by the end of the season is a remarkable, probably about 1 1/2 minute long video of your plants springing, literally, to life.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on these ideas and, if you try out an app and make a video, I’d love to know how it went and what you saw that maybe you wouldn’t have otherwise seen. Happy recording!