Field Notes - Log 001: Origin

Voice note, transcribed.

Right, so... how and why is Lennon Tree? Let me just talk this out, see if it lands.

Honestly? It started because nothing fit. We were doing the actual work, real sites, proper SEO, day in day out, and every tool we picked up did about eighty percent of what we needed and then made us do the last twenty by hand. Spreadsheets, tabs everywhere, copying URLs back and forth like it's 2009. And you put up with that for a while, because that's just the job, isn't it. Until one day you don't. Instead, you try something different, just to see if it works. 

The first problem was internal linking. The same tedious graft over and over, running reports and spreadsheets, and I just thought, no. I'm not doing this by hand again, can we please build a thing that does one specific job, and does it well?

So we did. That was Connect. And it worked. And that's the dangerous bit, right? Because once you've grown one and it actually does the exact job there was no solution for before, you start looking at every other annoyance that slows you down, well... you could just build that too.

So we did. Then the CMS. God, the CMS. The platform I'd been lumbered with was clunky, looked a decade out of date, with tired visuals, and a UI that was actively horrible to work in. I wanted something modern, you know? Something that looked the part and could bend to whatever the team needed, the minute they needed it. Something that was, and I can't stress this enough, not WordPress. So we grew that. The Lennon Tree website was actually built by Lennon Tree. Dogfooding at its finest.

We needed sitemaps off the back of it, so we grew those. We wanted to see how people actually moved round a page, and grew that too. None of it was part of a plan. Just identified a need, then built a thing. Need, then thing. Over and over, till one day we looked up and there was this whole ecosystem. Branches coming off of the same trunk, and we'd not really decided to plant any of it. It just happened.

And here's the daft part. We're not a software company. Not even close. We sell gazebos. Marquees, party tents, the lot. And somehow the gazebo retailer has ended up with a garden of tools that does proper work. Even the domain's got a story. It sat dormant fifteen years, an idea for something completely different, waiting for something to grow on it, and now here we are.

Why build it, though, instead of just buying the thing like everyone else? Control, mostly. When it's yours, you're not sat waiting on somebody else's roadmap, somebody else's bug list, somebody else's say-so. You want it different on Tuesday? You change it Tuesday. That's the whole thing really. That's the why.

Anyway. That's Lennon Tree. We grew it because we needed it, and it's still growing. You're basically watching it happen in real time. 

- The Gardener. 2026-06-22.