A growing plants screensaver that follows the seasons

Growing foliage is an organic, generative screensaver in the night pack of Screensavers by Zaweba. Made-up plant species grow tip by tip across a dark screen, turn green, then gold and brown, and drop their leaves, while new growth layers over the faded old. You set the growth speed, the season colours and how dense the planting is.

It's one of the slowest screensavers in the pack, and one of the most satisfying. Watch it for a minute and you see stems reaching out; come back after lunch and the whole screen has been through a season or two.

Plants that don't exist

The species are made up. They're grown by Zaweba's own code, not copied from photographs or botanical drawings, so you won't recognise any of them, and that's the point. Each plant grows from its tip, branching as it goes, which gives the natural, slightly unpredictable look you get from real growth. Because new growth layers over the faded old, the screen builds up a sense of history, like a hedge that has been there for years.

Season colours and density

Season colours has three choices. Natural follows the cycle of green, gold and brown. Mostly autumn leans into the warm golds and browns, which suits a cosy evening. Blossom brings in flowering colours for something springlike and brighter.

Density decides how much grows at once. Low density leaves plenty of dark space between plants and keeps the screen calm. High density fills it with foliage. Growth speed controls how fast the tips advance; slower is more meditative, faster lets you see a full season in a short time.

Adding it to Windows

Open Screensavers by Zaweba and choose Growing foliage. The live preview beside the settings follows every change, but growth is slow, so give each setting a moment to show itself. Press Preview full screen to see it at size. Then press Use this screensaver. It's built into your own Windows profile with no administrator rights, and Windows' Screen Saver Settings opens so you can select it and set the idle time before it starts.

Settings are read every time the screensaver starts, so you can swap autumn for blossom when spring comes without reinstalling.

A screensaver for long idle spells

Because the changes are gradual, Growing foliage rewards a screen that sits idle for a long time: a family computer in the evening, a display in a reception area, a second monitor. On several monitors you can run one on each, stretch one across all of them for a long border of plants, or keep it to the main monitor and blank the others.

On a laptop, Install and options has a frame cap of 30 or 60 frames a second, and a battery saver that blanks the screen below a chosen charge, 25 per cent by default.

Pairing it with other gentle scenes

Growing foliage sits nicely alongside Paisley layers, where patterns build over each other, and Difference clouds, where veins of light drift through the dark. All three are generative and slow. Tick them and use Install several, and you get one screensaver that picks among them at random each time the PC goes idle.

Like the rest of the pack, it's free software under the EULA, runs offline and needs no account.