Bulbasaur's Mysterious Garden, commonly known as Bulbagarden, is an English-language Pokémon community. It is most well known for its forums, and arguably its lack of a website.

Bulbagarden is somewhat unusual in the degree of autonomy each of its component services have - although the forums, Oekaki, Bulbapedia and Bulbanews are nominally under a single administration, Damian Silverblade, whom each of the component services are directly under, had noted in mid-2005, "as it is right now on BMG, the left hand doesn't know what the right in doing, the feet have restraining orders on each other, and the head has no clue what any of these are doing."

History

The original Bulbagarden.com website was run by Bulbasaur ("Bulba", better known now as Anenga or Anenga Chris, the head tester for the Shareaza P2P Network), and was in operation during the so-called heyday of Pokémon Websites, in the peerage of such esteemed sites as TPM, Azure Heights, and the original UPN. The original site was shut down at the beginning of 2001 after problems with advertisers left Bulba with no ability to pay for server operation. The files were held in stasis on the server until the beginning of February, during which time the (then) forum head admin Archaic launched a desperate bid to fund the server for just 1 more month, enough to be allowed access to the files again and to make a forum backup. It was, sadly, not to be.

Archaic brought the site back in late 2002, following significant downtime on the part of Serebii.net, contracting the services of some of the most well-versed people in the Pokémon community at the time. After opening up on January 1, 2003, Bulbagarden.com prospered, quickly gaining memberships on the forums and struggling to put a worthy site up for operations. A pilot site had been completed, but a full version was never offered.

About a year later, the Bulbagarden.com domain name expired and was promptly squatted on, that is, bought out by a company devoted to spam. After many attempts to reestablish the site at Bulbagarden.com, it was decided to move to a .net domain name, becoming (as it is today) Bulbagarden.net, which carries on the traditions and members of the Archaic-run Bulbagarden. Since then, the site has faced Denial of Service attacks and various other troubles, but has managed to hold together with a small, though loyal community.

Bulbagarden's current projects include but are not limited to the Evolutions: Destinies Project, a player-interactive RPG, Bulbapedia, a Pokémon encyclopedia, and various other anime synopses and Pokémon data classification projects.

Hostees

In its long history, Bulbasaur's Mysterious Garden hosted a wide variety or websites in an time where Pokémon sites were scrambling to be hosted by the bigger and more popular sites. One such place was Articuno Island or Prussian Town as it was known then. BMG currently hosts many other sites, including the current version of UPN, but Articuno Island was one of the first as it was one of the oldest Pokémon sites on the web.