Digital Garden

What is a Digital Garden?

Maggie Appleton

[Digital] Gardening is a practice that treats a personal website as a constantly evolving landscape where you develop your ideas in public.¹

Chris Aldrich

Informed heavily by their cultural predecessors in commonplace books, zettelkasten, and wikis, digital gardens are digital first note collections which are primarily public by default and encourage the idea of working in public.²

Daniel Sieger

Digital gardens stimulate the idea to create personalized content that is built to last and independent of locked-down third-party platforms.³

Tim Rodenbröker

Basically, it is usually a website, a kind of chaotic blog made up of unfinished text fragments, notes and ideas. These ideas undergo constant development by the author, sometime merging and refining them. The goal here is usually to develop text projects like essays. Each text document is considered to be like a plant that can grow.⁴

Chris Aldrich

Digital garden design can often use the gardening metaphor to focus attention on an active tending and care of one’s personal knowledge base and building toward new knowledge or creations. The idea of planting a knowledge “seed” (a note), tending it gradually over time with regular watering and feeding in a progression of Seedlings -> Budding -> Evergreen is a common feature.²

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

The garden metaphor is particularly apt: taking care of your mind involves cultivating your curiosity (the seeds), growing your knowledge (the trees), and producing new thoughts (the fruits). On the surface, it’s a repetitive process. You need consistency and patience. But each day tending to your “mind garden” is different: discovering a new learning strategy, having a eureka moment, connecting the dots between two authors, getting involved in a lively conversation with an expert.⁵

It’s great for perfectionist to create content without worry that the published contents are good enough for public consumption or not, as you will be come back to those evergreens again and again until they growth up to be to your liking.

They are well-suited for people who are interested in exploring their own thoughts and ideas without the pressure of creating finished content for a specific audience.

Key Characteristics of Digital Gardens

• Personal and reflective: A digital garden is a space for personal reflection and exploration. It’s not about creating polished content for others; it’s about nurturing your own understanding of the world.

• Non-linear: Digital gardens often have a non-linear structure, with links and connections between different ideas. This reflects the way our minds work, making it easier to follow your thoughts and make connections.

• Evergreen: Digital gardens are constantly evolving as the gardener learns to grows. New ideas are planted, old ideas are pruned, and connections are made.

The Concept

The concept of the digital garden is like going back to the basic of the old internet era, since when The Web was created, as Maggie Appleton mentioned in her post; “Metaphors We Web By”:

“In Tim Berners-Lee’s original pitch for The Web, he described it as a “non-linear text system” for notes. It was designed for scientific researchers and academics to pass around documents that would otherwise be printed on physical paper. The point of the web was to mimic long, text-based, paper documents, but simply make them easier to move around.”⁶

Daniel Sieger also posted on his blog post “Digital Gardens. Seriously?” agreed that “digital gardens are clearly reminiscent of the quirky personal websites of the early web.”³

In “How the Blog Broke the Web”, Amy Hoy wrote about the early days of the Internet:

“Dates didn’t matter all that much. Content lasted longer; there was less of it. Older content remained in view, too, because the dominant metaphor was table of contents rather than diary entry. Everyone with a homepage became a de facto amateur reference librarian.”⁷

Digital gardens can certainly be use to store and organize information in a way that resonates with you, building a personalized knowledge base, but the main point of it is to prioritize meaningful connections and personal interpretation over your collection of knowledge. It’s not just about saving facts, but it’s about tracking and understanding your intellectual journey.

Growth Stages

Daniel Sieger

One of the most interesting aspects [of digital garden] is the idea of non-performative writing, thinking, and learning in public. This allows you to get your ideas out there early and refine them over time. It lowers the friction to start writing, and reduces the fear of being judged. … Of course, there’s a flip side to that approach as well, and that’s false information. The raw material inevitably contains factual errors. This can, however, be mitigated to some extent by indicating the maturity and reliability of the content.³

Maggie Appleton metaphor and categorizes her content in three different growth stages; seedling, budding, and evergreen.

• Seedlings are ideas that just started. They are rough, unrefined, and need more time to grow.

• Buddings are ideas that has been revised and worked on a bit. They’re starting to grow, but still need refinement.

• Evergreens are ideas that has been invested significant time into. They are refined, edited, and won’t significantly change - aside from the occasional trimming.

The growth stage doesn’t have to be anything related to “garden,” though. It can be anything that make sense to you. Like how Nitin Pai use brewing coffee analogy to indicate the stage of his evergreen notes into 5 non-linear levels:

• Bean implies that content in his note is a new, undeveloped idea.

• Brewing is when he started working on it, but do not think it is ready for sampling.

• Brewed is when he think the content has finished brewing. Though, he might decide that it needs some more brewing at later stage.

• Overbrewed is when he revise and modify a note that he had previously considered brewed because he think it will improve, but he might ended up making it worse.

• In-the-sink is when he discarded the note, either because it is ruined, past the expiry date, is a royal mass or stinks.

By assigns growth stages to your evergreen notes, its allows you to know where you are in your learning journey, and lets the visitors know what to expect of your content.

Comparing Digital Garden to Commonplace Book

A commonplace book prioritize a more structured approach to note-taking, with topic, categories, and tags for organization. It is mainly used for reference, memory, or inspiration, by storing and retrieving information that is relevant or useful. They can be used to help with research, writing, and personal reflection.

A digital garden often embraces a more organic and non-linear flow, encourage the development of connections between different ideas. It is usually organized by associations, connections, or links.

Think of it this way, a commonplace book is like a meticulously organized botanical garden, with plants categorized by species and labeled with detailed information. It’s a valuable resource for learning about specific plants. Digital garden, on the other hand, is like a vibrant forest, where trees intertwine, vines climb, and unexpected paths lead to hidden clearings. It’s a place for exploration and discovery.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Your note-taking app, … can be used for collating snippets, ideas, and raw thinking. Use it to seed your garden and connect the dots. Once you have managed to articulate a new idea (new to you at least), write down a few more structured sentences, and add it to your digital garden as an evergreen note. You can stop here, but for people who have a proper blog or a newsletter, you may want to publish longer essays there.⁵

Jacky Zhao

Digital gardening is not just passive knowledge collection. It’s a form of expression and sharing. The goal should be to tap into your network’s collective intelligence to create constructive feedback loops, not to post content that “gains clout” or make you look smart.⁸

Comparing Digital Garden to Blog

Digital gardens are more focused on the process of thinking and learning than on publishing finished content. They are often non-linear and interconnected, with links and connections between different ideas. Digital gardens are typically not aimed at specific audience, and the author may be more interested in personal reflection and exploration than in generating traffic or building a following.

Connections by Finsa

They are very similar to blogs, but they aren’t necessarily about what’s going on in the world at the moment. In digital gardens, the content is not packaged for the reader’s consumption. It may consist of musing that never reach a final destination.⁹

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

A digital garden is an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public. Contrary to a blog, where articles and essays have a publication date and start decaying as soon as they are published, a digital garden is evergreen: digital gardeners keep on editing and refining their notes.¹⁰

Tom Critchlow

It’s a less-performative version of blogging - more of a captain’s log than a broadcast blog. The distinction will come down to how you blog - some people blog in much the same way. For me however blogging is mostly performative thinking and less captain’s log. So I am looking for a space to nurture, edit in real time and evolve my thinking.¹¹

Editorial Team @ Ness Labs

Digital gardening is a great way to produce content on your way to learn. In contrast with traditional blogging, it’s a less scary and less friction. It doesn’t get outdated easily like a blog does, and you can make incremental changes instead of churning out blog posts every week.¹²

Loni

In opposition to dead blogs with timestamped articles, a lively corpus of “evergreen” articles would be more interesting. In opposition to very “machine” and “algorithm” calibrated articles, we would read and write personal and useful articles.¹³

Comparing Digital Garden to Wiki

Similarity to Coding

Note

The concept of the digital garden is reminiscing the way of how the programming/coding work. Perhaps, that’s why it’s gain popularity among those?

Andy Matuschak

It’s best to create notes which are only about one thing—but which, as much as possible, capture the entirety of that thing. This way, it’s easier to form connection across topics and contexts. If your notes are too broad, you might not notice when you encounter some new idea about one of the notions contained within, and links to that note will be muddied. If your notes are too fragmented, you’ll also fragment your link network, which may make it harder to see certain connections.

… The notion is quite similar to the software engineering principle of separation of concerns, which suggests that modules should only be “about” one thing, so that they’re more easily reusable. But likewise, if you fragment modules too much, you’ll have a cohesion problem.¹⁴

Can Digital Garden be private?

Digital garden doesn’t have to be a public space. It can be a private place for you to cultivates your ideas. However, there are benefits in putting your garden to the public.

If you feel comfortable, share your digital garden with others. This can help you connect with other learners and get feedback on your ideas.

Andy Matuschak

One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” to riff on a passage from Robin Sloan. This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it’s Screenshot Saturday; it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re pondering in the shower; it’s thinking out loud about the ways in which your project doesn’t work at all. It’s so much of Twitch. I want to see the process. I want to see you trim the artichoke. I want to see you choose the color palette. Anti-marketing.¹⁵

Tips on building a Digital Garden

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

When consuming content, grow branches on your knowledge tree by taking notes. Short notes, long notes—it doesn’t matter as much as writing your thoughts in your own words. That’s called the generation effect, and it states that you better remember information when you create your own version of it.⁵

Danielle Messler

A digital garden is your corner of the internet—a place for you to explore and write about what interests you, just because it interests you. Without worrying about if it’s in your niche. Without worrying whether or not your audience will like it. Without the pressure of having all the answers wrapped up in one neat post.¹⁶

Shawn Wang

Make the thing you wish you had found when you were learning. Don’t judge your results by “claps” or retweets or stars or upvotes - just talk to yourself from 3 months ago.¹⁷

Don’t try to create a perfect digital garden overnight. Begin with capturing ideas and snippets of text. As you explore, your garden will naturally evolve and find its own shape.

Shawn Wang

Start building a persistent knowledge base that grows over time. … At every step of the way: Document what you did and the problems you solved.¹⁷

Andy Zhao

I tend to generally bookmark things for later then revisit then when I have time. For projects, writing, and all sorts of reading. Even when reading books, I don’t like to take complex notes right away will only bookmark or highlight phrases. I will eventually come back to the bookmarks a second time to generate insights and actual thoughts. It feel like this weeds out unnecessary noise and provides a natural chance for spaced repetition.⁸

Maintaining a digital garden can foster personal growth and self-awareness as you reflect on your thoughts and experiences. Make time to write and reflect regularly, even if it’s just 15 minutes a day. Regular tending keeps the ideas flowing. The more you use your digital garden, the more valuable it will become.

Digital garden is your space to play, experiment, and grow. Don’t be afraid to get messy, make mistakes, and rediscover forgotten corners of your mind. Your digital garden is a reflection of you, so let it bloom in its unique way.

Tools

• Obsidian — a markdown writing app.
• Hugo — an open-source static site generator.
• Webmention.io — a hosted service created to easily receive webmentions on any web page.

Resources

• MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners

Examples of the Digital Garden

• https://maggieappleton.com/
• https://notes.andymatuschak.org/
• https://strikingloo.github.io/
• https://notes.nicolevanderhoeven.com/
• https://notes.nitinpai.in/
• https://jzhao.xyz/

Further Reading

• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton
• How the Blog Broke the Web by Amy Hoy
• Learn in Public by Shawn Wang
• Digital Garden Terms of Service by Shawn Wang
• r/DigitalGardens community on Reddit

References