History

Drusilla's Garden was created to pay homage to Juliet Landau's gripping portrayal of the insane vampiress Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and now Angel).

While there were a host of older, unupdated sites about Spike and Drusilla, what the Buffy/Angel online community lacked was a website totally dedicated to Drusilla.

So I made one.

After the ever popular website Dead Daisies + Railroad Spikes + Black Leather Pants = ? went offline, a rift was opened which offered the perfect timing for the launch of a new site dedicated to the evil characters, with particular emphasis on the relatively unsung villianess of Drusilla.

Just before Dead Daisies went offline, I saved copies of every picture from the Drusilla gallery and the Spike and Drusilla gallery to set about creating the graphics for my new site, appropriately named Drusilla's Garden after the Drusilla section from Dead Daisies. I used an old Windows 3.1 graphics program called Corel Photo-Paint Version 5.0 (I think they're up to about version 8 or 9 now) to create the graphics, and I still use it nowadays. I'd already created a Drusilla wallpaper using the program (The Queen Of The Damned, located in the Wallpaper gallery), and decided to keep with the same look - colour pics on a purple background. The original site graphics were simply several of the Drusilla publicity shots in colour set against purple mist. The main background consisted simply of a purple starfield.

After making the front a pages, and getting everything linking correctly, I set about collating the Drusilla and Spike & Drusilla galleries, using the shots from Dead Daisies and a whole heap of others. I wanted the galleries to feature some of those classis screenshots of our Dru, but no decent quality ones were available. After hearing of the imminent release of Buffy on DVD, I knew just how to aquire those shots! Of course I'd have to wait for many months for them to be released, but I could wait.

However, until that time, I didn't really have much to attract people to the site. So I added a section dealing with a few more of the bad guys from the show, and even included the vampire Armand from the movie Interview With The Vampire.

Spike, Angelus, Faith, and Armand were added to the site, including galleries and biographies (well, Angelus' was and still hasn't been ever finished).

The front pages of site were first uploaded on the 31st of September, 2000.

Around mid-October, 2000, I downloaded the trailer for the fifth episode of Angel's second season, and was overjoyed to see Drusilla in it. Dru was back! After seeing it, I scrounged the net for any information I could on Drusilla's resurgence and to my delight found that Juliet Landau had already finished shooting a crossover episode dealing with her past with Spike and Angelus. And then of course Dru made her return to the present in the ninth episode of the second season of Angel.

After buying the Buffy season one DVDs, I gave the site a makeover, remaking all the graphics with purple-washed pictures over purple and black flames. I removed Armand (I still have all the DVD screenshots I took of him if anyone wants them) and added the Master and Darla. Using HyperSnap-DX I took a heap of screenshots of the Master and Darla from the DVDs and added them to the site.

The site received its biggest makeover in early May, 2001, when the season two DVDs were released in Australia. DVD screenshot galleries were added, as well as CD-quality audio clips. Also in May 2001, I met James Marsters at a Sydney convention, which was great.

Now with 1024x768 screen resolutions becoming the default on all new PCs, the site has had another refit, once again utilising frames so as to optimize viewing for both 800x600 and 1024x768.

Anyway, thanks all of you for visiting the site.

Decutus
Webmaster, Drusilla's Garden