# A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

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## Metadata
- Author: [[maggieappleton.com]]
- Full Title: A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
- Category: #articles
- URL: https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history

## Highlights
- Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, 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.
- Language is always a response to the evolving world around us – we expand it when our current vocabulary fails to capture what we're observing, or have a particular desire for how we'd like the future to unfold
- people were using the term as a way to describe digital maintenance - the act of cleaning up one's digital space
- Caufield makes clear digital gardening is not about specific tools – it's not a Wordpress plugin, Gastby theme, or Jekyll template. It's a different way of thinking about our online behaviour around information - one that accumulates personal knowledge over time in an explorable space.
- The garden is our counterbalance. Gardens present information in a richly linked landscape that grows slowly over time.
- Everything is arranged and connected in ways that allow you to explore.
- You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.
- Good ideas take time to germinate, and Caufield's vision of the personal garden didn't reach critical mass right off the bat. It lay dormant, waiting for the right time and the right people to find it.
- Instead of hand-coding your own layout and deciding exactly how to arrange tItshe digital furniture, we began to enter the age of standardised layouts.
- "Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages... they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a web page."
## New highlights added March 14, 2022 at 1:17 PM
- Many of these early adopters were people who understood how to build websites – either professional developers or enthusiastic hobbyists. Any kind of novel experimentation with the web requires knowing a non-trivial amount of HTML, CSS, and J
- While developers were the first on the scene, plenty of writers, researchers, and note-taking enthusiasts have been drawn to the idea of digital gardening. To help folks without programming skills join in, there's been a surge in templates and platforms that allow people to build their own digital gardens without touching a ton of code. I've written an entire guide to if you fall into that category.
- Dense links are essential, but gardeners often layer on other ways of exploring their knowledge base. They might have , , tags and filtering functionality, , , or listing notable and popular content.
- 1. Topography over Timelines
- Because garden notes are densely linked, a garden explorer can enter at any location and follow any trail they link through the content, rather than being dumped into a "most recent" feed.
- The Six Patterns of Gardening
- This runs counter to the time-based structure of traditional blogs: posts presented in reverse chronological order based on publication date
- 2. Continuous Growth
  Gardens are never finished, they're constantly growing, evolving, and changing. Just like a real soil, carrot, and cabbage garden.
- Gardens are organised around contextual relationships and associative links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it's connected to others.
- Many of the people who jumped on the early digital gardening bandwagon were part of communities like...
- the last decade, we've moved away from casual live journal entries and formalised our writing into articles and essays. These are carefully crafted, edited, revised, and published with a timestamp. When it's done, it's done. We act like tiny magazines, sending our writing off to the printer.
- What you publish is always open to revision and expansion.
- Gardens are designed to evolve alongside your thoughts. When you first have an idea, it's fuzzy and unrefined.
- In garden-land, that process of researching and refining happens on the open internet. You post ideas while they're still "seedlings," and tend them regularly until they're fully grown, respectable opinions.
- You're freed from the pressure to get everything right immediately. You can test ideas, get feedback, and revise your opinions like a good internet citizen.
- It's low friction. Gardening your thoughts becomes a daily ritual that only takes a small amount of effort. Over time, big things grow.
- It gives readers an insight into your writing and thinking process. They come to realise you are not a magical idea machine banging out perfectly formed thoughts, but instead an equally mediocre human doing The Work of trying to understand the world and make sense of it alongside you.
- gardens make their imperfection known to readers.
- Gardens are imperfect by design. They don't hide their rough edges or claim to be a permanent source of truth.
- Putting anything imperfect and half-written on an "official website" may feel strange
- Digital gardening is the response to the professional personal blog; it's both intimate and public, weird and welcoming.
- It's less performative than a blog, but more intentional and thoughtful than a Twitter
- It wants to build personal knowledge over time, rather than engage in banter and quippy conversations.
- Gardening sits in the middle. It's the perfect balance of chaos and cultivation.
- This ethos of imperfection opens up a world of possibility that performative blogging shut down
- it enables you to ; the practice of sharing what you learn as you're learning it, not a decade later once you're an "expert
- Publishing imperfect and early ideas requires that we make the status of our notes clear to readers.
- Devon Zuegal is another notable gardener who has epistemic status and epistemic effort on their posts, indicating both their certainty level about the material, and how much effort went into making it
- 4. Playful, Personal, and Experimental
- Gardens are non-homogenous by nature. You can plant the same seeds as your neighbour, but you'll always end up with a different arrangement of plants.
- Digital gardens should be just as unique and particular as their vegetative counterparts. The point of a garden is that it's a personal playspace
- Gardens offer us the ability to present ourselves in forms that aren't cookie cutter profiles. They're the higher-fidelity version, complete with quirks, contradictions, and complexity
- 5. Intercropping & Content Diversity
- It is also absurd to ignore the fact we're living in an audio-visual cornucopia that the web makes possible.
- 6. Independent Owners
- Gardening is about claiming a small patch of the web for yourself, one you fully own and control.
- Independently owning your garden helps you plan for long-term change. You should think about how you want your space to grow over the next few decades, not just the next few months.
- No one owns The Official Definition of digital gardening. Numerous people have contributed to the growing conversation and you should read their thoughts as well.