digital garden
[[concept]]
digital gardening is a squishy concept with no real definition. I use Digital Garden to describe
- a {-1||private personal note-taking, knowledge-management, and thinking system-} that typically is inspired by (or resembles) {-2||Zettelkasten, evergreen notes, and/or second-brain-}, systems in conjunction with
- A {-3||public-facing "blog"-like component-} where an author shares some or all of their notes
Under this characterization/as an extension or consequence,
Private gardening is a note-taking system. Public gardening is an information-sharing philosophy. digital gardening is an internet aesthetic that combines a private garden with a public garden.
This notion is corroborated/informed by the analyses by Maggie Appleton in A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden, which seems to be considered one of the canonical writings on digital gardens and nerdy note-taking.
References
Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet
Welcome to the world of “digital gardens.” These creative reimaginings of blogs have quietly taken nerdier corners of the internet by storm.
Digital gardens explore a wide variety of topics and are frequently adjusted and changed to show growth and learning, particularly among people with niche interests.
Beneath the umbrella term, however, digital gardens don’t follow rules.
“With blogging, you’re talking to a large audience,” [Tom Critchlow] says. “With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time.”
digital gardens reject those fixed design elements
“By engaging in digital gardening, you are constantly finding new connections, more depth and nuance,” [Mike Caulfield] says. “What you write about is not a fossilized bit of commentary for a blog post. When you learn more, you add to it. It’s less about shock and rage; it’s more connective.”
more creative freedom than social-media and web-hosting sites that let you drag and drop elements onto your page, but it can be daunting and time-consuming
A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis
A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing.
there’s not one strict meaning to the term
It’s a different way of thinking about our online behaviour around information - one that accumulates personal knowledge over time in an explorable space
Gardens present information in a richly linked landscape
The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces
There are contested ideas about what qualifies as a garden, what the core ethos should focus on, and whether it’s worthy of a new label at all. What exactly makes a website a digital garden as opposed to just another blog?
(1) Gardens are organised around contextual relationships and associative links...garden notes are densely linked
Gardeners often layer on other ways of exploring their knowledge base.
(2) Gardens are never finished, they’re constantly growing, evolving, and changing.
(3) Gardens are imperfect by design. They don’t hide their rough edges or claim to be a permanent source of truth.
(4) Playful, Personal, and Experimental
...non-homogenous by nature
(5) Intercropping & Content Diversity
Podcasts, videos, diagrams, illustrations, interactive web animations, academic papers, tweets, rough sketches, and code snippets should all live and grow in the garden.
(6) Gardening is about claiming a small patch of the web for yourself, one you fully own and control.
The Garden and the Stream- A Technopastoral (essay)
The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.
something more timeless, integrative, iterative, something less personal and less self-assertive, something more solitary yet more connected.
Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relations or canonical sequence, and that’s part of what we mean when we say “the web as topology” or the “web as space”. Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships
Each flower, tree, and vine is seen in relation to the whole by the gardener so that the visitors can have unique yet coherent experiences as they find their own paths through the garden. We create the garden as a sort of experience generator, capable of infinite expression and meaning.
to link, annotate, change, summarize, copy, and share — these are the verbs of gardening
Mentions
| File | Last Modified |
|---|---|
| Welcome | 2025-06-04 |
| maggieappleton.com | 2025-05-12 |
| notes.joschua.io | 2025-05-12 |
| Buster's Notes | 2025-04-18 |
| gwern.net | 2025-04-18 |
| Mental Nodes | 2025-04-18 |
| my note-taking system | 2025-04-18 |
| my obsidian vault | 2025-04-18 |
| tom critchlow's wiki | 2025-04-18 |
| why is this a digital garden | 2025-04-18 |
| digital gardening is a squishy concept | 2025-04-15 |
| my digital garden is also a zettelkasten | 2025-04-15 |
| Private gardening is a note-taking system. Public gardening is an information-sharing philosophy. | 2025-03-29 |
| 2025-03-25. research as a garden | 2025-03-26 |
Created 2025-03-17 Last Modified 2025-05-05
