# L-Systems & Grammar Drawing

**Track:** Physics, Motion & Emergence — Creative Coding — the existing 50
**Framework / surface:** p5.js
**Level:** Intermediate
**Prerequisites:** Recursive Fractal Tree, Typography & Text Systems

**In one line:** Rewrite a string with a rule, then draw it — growing plants and fractals.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

An L-system grows form from text. Starting with a short string, a rewriting rule replaces each symbol with a longer phrase, repeated over generations, after which the final string is read as drawing commands—move, turn, branch. Aristid Lindenmayer devised the formalism in 1968 to model how plants and algae develop, and Przemysław Prusinkiewicz elaborated it into the lush imagery of "The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants." Because branching is encoded as bracketed push-and-pop, a handful of rules unfolds into ferns, bushes, and trees of convincing botanical character. The aesthetic is generative growth: development rather than assembly, a single grammar yielding endless non-identical specimens of one species.