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 [1]Home
 The Garden
 [3]Now
 [4]About
 Essays
 
 evergreen
 
 A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
 
 A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web
 
   • [6]Digital Gardening
   • [7]Personal Knowledge
   • [8]The Web
 
 Planted over 3 years agoLast tended over 2 years ago
 Back To Top
 
 Table of Contents
 
 [10]A Brief History of Digital Gardens[11]The Early Gardens of Hypertext[12]
 Digital Puttering on Twitter[13]Gardens, Streams, and Caufield's Metaphors[14]
 Carrying on Caufield[15]Digital Gardening's Fertile Soil[16]Developer-led
 Gardening[17]The Six Patterns of Gardening[18]1. Topography over Timelines[19]
 2. Continuous Growth[20]3. Imperfection & Learning in Public[21]4. Playful,
 Personal, and Experimental[22]5. Intercropping & Content Diversity[23]6.
 Independent Ownership
 
 Table of Contents
 
 [24]A Brief History of Digital Gardens[25]The Early Gardens of Hypertext[26]
 Digital Puttering on Twitter[27]Gardens, Streams, and Caufield's Metaphors[28]
 Carrying on Caufield[29]Digital Gardening's Fertile Soil[30]Developer-led
 Gardening[31]The Six Patterns of Gardening[32]1. Topography over Timelines[33]
 2. Continuous Growth[34]3. Imperfection & Learning in Public[35]4. Playful,
 Personal, and Experimental[36]5. Intercropping & Content Diversity[37]6.
 Independent Ownership
 Loading...
 
 My highlighted a number of sites that are taking a new approach to the way we
 publish personal knowledge on the web.
 
 They're not following the conventions of the "personal blog," as we've come to
 know it. 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.
 
 It harkens back to the early days of the web when people had fewer notions of
 how websites "should be.” It's an ethos that is both classically old and newly
 imagined.
 
 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 [38]
 
 A Brief History of Digital Gardens
 
 Let's go on a short journey to the origin of this word. The notion of a digital
 garden is not a 2020 invention. It's been floating around for over two decades.
 However, it's passed through a couple of semantic shifts in that time, meaning
 different things to different people across the years. As words tend to do.
 
 Tracing back how
 [39]Neologisms
 are born helps us understand why anyone needed this word in the first place.
 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. Naming is a political
 act as much as a poetic one.
 
 The Early Gardens of Hypertext
 
 Mark Bernstein's 1998 essay appears to be the first recorded mention of the
 term. Mark was part of the early hypertext crowd – the developers figuring out
 how to arrange and present this new medium.
 
 While the essay is a beautiful ode to free-wheeling internet exploration, it's
 less about building personal internet spaces, and more of a manifesto on user
 experience flows and content organisation.
 
 Let's note that Mark's graphics are to die for
 
 To put this in its historical context, Mark's writing was part of a larger
 conversation happening throughout the nineties around hypertext and its
 metaphorical framing.
 
 The early web-adopters were caught up in the idea of The Web as a
 labyrinth-esque community landscape tended by and These creators wanted to
 enable pick-your-own-path experiences, while also providing enough signposts
 that people didn't feel lost in their new, strange medium.
 
 The early web debates around this became known as – the issue of how to give
 web users just enough guidance to freely explore the web, without forcing them
 into pre-defined browsing experiences. The eternal struggle to find the right
 balance of chaos and structure.
 
     "Unplanned hypertext sprawl is wilderness: complex and interesting, but
     uninviting. Interesting things await us in the thickets, but we may be
     reluctant to plough through the brush, subject to thorns and mosquitoes"
 
 While Mark's essay was concerned with different problems to the ones we face on
 the web today, its core ethos feels aligned with our emerging understanding of
 digital gardening. It captures the desire for exploratory experiences, a
 welcoming of digital weirdness, and a healthy amount of resistance to top-down
 structures.
 
 After Mark's essay the term digital gardening goes quiet for nearly a decade.
 
 Digital Puttering on Twitter
 
 In April of 2007 when Tweets first started ringing through the internet
 airwaves, Rory Sutherland (oddly, the vice president of Ogilvy Group) used the
 term "digital gardening", but defined it as "faffing about syncing things,
 defragging - like pruning for young people"
 
 Loading...
 
 The next dozen mentions on Twitter all followed this sentiment – people were
 using the term as a way to describe digital maintenance - the act of cleaning
 up one's digital space. The focus was on sorting, weeding, pruning, and
 decluttering, rather than growing and cultivating. People mentioned cleaning
 out private folders, codebases, and photo albums as the focus of their
 gardening efforts.
 
 These people were digital puttering more than gardening.
 
 Loading...
 Loading...
 Loading...
 
 Since none of these folks reference to the earlier nineties notion of digital
 gardening, or mention issues of hypertext navigation, this use of the word
 feels like a brief tangent. Given the tiny size of Twitter in the early days,
 these people probably belonged to the same social flocks and were riffing off
 one another. It's not necessarily part of the mainstream narrative we're
 tracking, but shows there's not one strict meaning to the term.
 
 That said, some degree of faffing about, sorting, and pruning are certainly
 part of the practice of digital gardening. Though best enjoyed in moderation.
 
 Gardens, Streams, and Caufield's Metaphors
 
 At the 2015 Digital Learning Research Network, Mike Caufield delivered a
 keynote on . It later becomes that lays the foundations for our current
 understanding of the term. If anyone should be considered the original source
 of digital gardening, it's Caufield. They are the first to lay out this whole
 idea in poetic, coherent words.
 
 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.
 
 Caufield's main argument was that we have become swept away by streams – the
 collapse of information into single-track timelines of events. The
 conversational feed design of email inboxes, group chats, and InstaTwitBook is
 fleeting – they're only concerned with self-assertive immediate thoughts that
 rush by us in a few moments.
 
 This is not inherently bad. Streams have their time and place. Twitter is a
 force-multiplier for exploratory thoughts and delightful encounters once you
 fall in with the right crowd and learn to play the game.
 
 But streams only surface the Zeitgeisty ideas of the last 24 hours. They are
 not designed to accumulate knowledge, connect disparate information, or mature
 over time.
 
 
 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. Think about the way Wikipedia
 works when you're hopping from to to . It's hyperlinking at it's best. 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.
 
     "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."
 
 Carrying on Caufield
 
 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.
 
 In late 2018 the corner of Twitter I hang out in began using the term more
 regularly – folks began passing around Caufield's original article and
 experimenting with ways to turn their chronological blogs into exploratory,
 interlinked gardens.
 
 Tom Critchlow's 2018 article was one of the main kick-off points. Tom read
 Caufield's essay and began speculating on alternative metaphors to frame the
 way we consume and produce information. They suggested we add campfires to the
 idea of streams and gardens – the private Slack groups, casual blog rings, and
 [40]Cozy Web
 areas where people write in response to one another. While gardens present the
 ideas of an individual, campfires are conversational spaces to exchange ideas
 that aren't yet fully formed.
 
 Tom piece was shortly followed by Joel Hooks' in early 2019. Joel focused on
 the process of digital gardening, emphasising the slow growth of ideas through
 writing, rewriting, editing, and revising thoughts in public. Instead of
 slapping Fully Formed Opinions up on the web and never changing them.
 
 Joel also added Amy Hoy's post to the pile of influential ideas that led to our
 current gardening infatuation. While not specifically about gardening, Amy's
 piece gives us a lot of good historical context. In it, she explores the
 history of blogs over the last three decades, and pinpoints exactly when we all
 became fixated on publishing our thoughts in reverse chronological order
 (spoiler: around 2001 with the launch of ).
 
 Amy argues that Moveable Type didn't just launch us into the "Chronological
 Sort Era". It also killed the wild, diverse, hodge-podge personalisation of
 websites that characterised the early web. Instead of hand-coding your own
 layout and deciding exactly how to arrange the digital furniture, we began to
 enter the age of standardised layouts. Plug n' play templates that you drop
 content into became the norm. It became harder and more technically involved to
 edit the HTML & CSS yourself.
 
     "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."
 
 Many people have lamented the web's slow transition from unique homepages to a
 bland ocean of generic Wordpress themes. Digital gardening is part of the
 pushback against the limited range of vanilla web formats and layouts we now
 for granted.
 
 Over the course 2019 and early 2020, more and more people began riffing on the
 concept. Shaun Wang compiled the . Anne-Laure Le Cunff published a popular
 guide to setting up . The IndieWeb community hosted a to discuss the history of
 commonplace books, personal wikis, and memory palaces.
 
 By late 2020 this whole concept had attracted enough attention for the MIT Tech
 Review to write on it. Perhaps this is the watershed moment when a Twitter
 buzzword has "made it."
 
 Digital Gardening's Fertile Soil
 
 What made our current historical moment the right time for digital gardening to
 take off?
 
 The timing coincided with a few complimentary ideas and communities rallying
 around personal knowledge systems, note-taking practices, and reimagining tools
 for blogging. The scene was ripe for new ideas around curating and sharing
 personal knowledge online.
 
 Many of the people who jumped on the early digital gardening bandwagon were
 part of communities like...
 
   • The collective – a group that has been championing independent web spaces
     outside the walled gardens of Instatwitbook for nearly a decade.
   • Users of the note-taking app – Roam pioneered new ways of interlinking
     content and strongly appeals to people trying to build sprawling knowledge
     graphs.
   • Followers of Tiago Forte's course which popularised the idea of actively
     curating personal knowledge.
   • People rallying around the ethos that encourages continuously creating
     'learning exhaust' in the form of notes and summaries.
 
 Developer-led Gardening
 
 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 JS. Not to mention all the surrounding infrastructure required
 actually to get a site live. Developers took to the idea because they already
 had the technical ability to jump in play around with what garden-esque
 websites might look like.
 
 The current state of web development helped here too. While it feels like we've
 been in a slow descent into a horrifyingly complex and bloated web development
 process, a number of recent tools have made it easier to get a fully customised
 website up and running. Services like and have taken the pain out of
 deployment. Static site generators like , , and make it easier to build
 sophisticated websites that auto-generate pages, and take care of grunt work
 like optimising load time, images, and SEO. These services are trying to find a
 happy middle ground between tediously hand-coding solutions, and being trapped
 in the restrictions of Wordpress or Squarespace.
 
 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
 [41]Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks
 if you fall into that category.
 
 Tools like , , and are all great options. Many of them offer fancy features
 like nested folders,
 [42]Bi-Directional Links
 , footnotes, and visual graphs.
 
 However, many of these no-code tools still feel like cookie-cutter solutions.
 Rather than allowing people to design the and spatial layouts of their gardens,
 they inevitably force people into pre-made arrangements. This doesn't meant
 they don't "count,” as "real” gardens, but simply that they limit their
 gardeners to some extent. You can't design different types of links, novel
 features, experimental layouts, or custom architecture. They're pre-fab houses
 instead of raw building materials.
 
 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 [43]
 
 The Six Patterns of Gardening
 
 In all the recent gardening flurry, we've run into the inevitable confusion
 around how to define the term.
 
 Loading...
 
 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?
 
 After reading all the existing takes on the term, observing a wide variety of
 gardens, and collecting some of the , I've identified a few key qualities they
 all share.
 
 There are a few guiding principles, design patterns and structures people are
 rallying around. This amounts to a kind of digital gardening
 [44]Pattern Language
 .
 
 1. Topography over Timelines
 
 Gardens are organised around contextual relationships and associative links;
 the concepts and themes within each note determine how it's connected to
 others.
 
 This runs counter to the time-based structure of traditional blogs: posts
 presented in reverse chronological order based on publication date.
 
 Gardens don't consider publication dates the most important detail of a piece
 of writing. Dates might be included on posts, but they aren't the structural
 basis of how you navigate around the garden. Posts are connected to other by
 posts through related themes, topics, and shared context.
 
 One of the best ways to do this is through
 [45]Bi-Directional Links
 – links that make both the destination page and the source page visible to the
 reader. This makes it easy to move between related content.
 
 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.
 
 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.
 
 Many entry points but no prescribed pathways.
 
 2. Continuous Growth
 
 Gardens are never finished, they're constantly growing, evolving, and changing.
 Just like a real soil, carrot, and cabbage garden.
 
 The isn't how we usually think about writing on the web. Over 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.
 
 This is odd considering editability is one of the main selling points of the
 web. Gardens lean into this – there is no "final version” on a garden. 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. You might notice a pattern in your corner of
 the world, but need to collect evidence, consider counter-arguments, spot
 similar trends, and research who else has thunk such thoughts before you. In
 short, you need to do your homework and critically think about it over time.
 
 In performance-blog-land you do that thinking and researching privately, then
 shove it out at the final moment. A grand flourish that hides the process.
 
 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.
 
 This has a number of benefits:
 
   • 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.
 
 This all comes with an important caveat; gardens make their imperfection known
 to readers. Which brings us to the next pattern...
 
 3. Imperfection & Learning in Public
 
 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. We have all been trained to behave like tiny, performative
 corporations when it comes to presenting ourselves in digital space. Blogging
 evolved in the culture of Millenialism as a way to Promote Your Personal Brand™
 and market your SEO-optimized Content.
 
 Weird, quirky personal blogs of the early 2000's turned into cleanly crafted
 brands with publishing strategies and media campaigns. Everyone now has a
 modern minimalist logo and an LLC.
 
 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 feed. It wants to build
 personal knowledge over time, rather than engage in banter and quippy
 conversations.
 
 Think of it as a spectrum. Things we dump into private WhatsApp group chats,
 DMs, and cavalier Tweet threads are part of our chaos streams - a continuous
 flow of high noise / low signal ideas. On the other end we have highly
 performative and cultivated artefacts like published books that you prune and
 tend for years.
 
 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. First, 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.”
 
 This freedom of course comes with great responsibility. Publishing imperfect
 and early ideas requires that we make the status of our notes clear to readers.
 You should include some indicator of how "done” they are, and how much effort
 you've invested in them.
 
 This could be with a simple categorisation system. I personally use an overly
 horticultural metaphor:
 
   • 🌱 Seedlings for very rough and early ideas
   • 🌿 Budding for work I've cleaned up and clarified
   • 🌳 Evergreen for work that is reasonably complete (though I still tend these
     over time).
 
 I also include the dates I planted and last tended a post so people get a sense
 of how long I've been growing it.
 
 Other gardeners include an epistemic status on their posts – a short statement
 that makes clear how they know what they know, and how much time they've
 invested in researching it.
 
 was one of the earliest and most consistent gardeners to offer meta-reflections
 on their work. Each entry comes with:
 
   • topic tags
   • start and end date
   • a stage tag: draft, in progress, or finished
   • a certainty tag: impossible, unlikely, certain, etc.
   • 1-10 importance tag
 
 These are all explained in their , which is worth reading if you're designing
 your own epistemological system.
 
 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. They also make a strong case
 for as a feature, not a bug.
 
 In a similar vein, Shawn Wang has written the Digital Gardening which I adore
 and ascribe to. They ask the reader to allow the writer to be wrong, offer
 constructive criticism, and attribute their work. They ask gardeners to be
 considerate of others (don't share private information or name and shame),
 offer epistemic disclosure, and respond to feedback.
 
 The digital gardening terms of service – Source: Shawn Wang, swyx.io
 
 All of these design patterns feed our growing desire for transparency, meta
 information, and breadcrumbs back to the source of ideas.
 
 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. You
 organise the garden around the ideas and mediums that match your way of
 thinking, rather than off someone else's standardised template.
 
 Ideally, this involves experimenting with the native languages of the web –
 HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They're the most flexible and robust tools we have
 for building interconnected knowledge online. Gardens are a chance to question
 the established norms of a 'personal website', and make space for weirder,
 wilder experiments.
 
 That said, I should acknowledge that jumping into full-on web development is
 simply beyond the abilities and interests of many people. There is still room
 for personalisation and play if you're using a pre-made template or service –
 it'll just be within the constraints of that system.
 
 One goal of these hyper-personalised gardens is deep contextualisation. The
 overwhelming lesson of the Web 2.0 social media age is that dumping millions of
 people together into decontextualised social spaces is a shit show. Devoid of
 any established social norms and abstracted from our specific cultural
 identities, we end up in awkward, aggravating exchanges with people who are
 socially incoherent to us. We know nothing of their lives, backgrounds, or
 belief systems, and have to assume the worst. Twitter only offers us a 240
 character bio. Facebook pre-selects the categories it deems important about you
 – relationship status, gender, hometown.
 
 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
 
 Gardens are not just a collection of interlinked words. While linear writing is
 an incredible medium that has served us well for a little over 5000 years, it
 is daft to pretend working in a single medium is a sufficient way to explore
 complex ideas.
 
 It is also absurd to ignore the fact we're living in an audio-visual cornucopia
 that the web makes possible. Podcasts, videos, diagrams, illustrations,
 interactive web animations, academic papers, tweets, rough sketches, and code
 snippets should all live and grow in the garden.
 
 [intercropping-garden_shrink_mx6nx8]
 
 Historically, monocropping has been the quickest route to starvation, pests,
 and famine. Don't be a lumper potato farmer while everyone else is sustainably
 intercropping.
 
 6. Independent Ownership
 
 Gardening is about claiming a small patch of the web for yourself, one you
 fully own and control.
 
 This patch should not live on the servers of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter,
 Instagram (aka. also Facebook), or Medium. None of these platforms are designed
 to help you slowly build and weave personal knowledge. Most of them actively
 fight against it.
 
 If any of those services go under, your writing and creations sink with it
 (crazier things have happened in the span of humanity). None of them have an
 easy export button. And they certainly won't hand you your data in a
 transferable format.
 
 A set of walled gardens with the Twitter, Medium, and Facebook logos next to an
 open garden built on HTML, CSS, and Markdown
 
 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.
 
 If you give it a bit of forethought, you can build your garden in a way that
 makes it easy to transfer and adapt. Platforms and technologies will inevitably
 change. Using old-school, reliable, and widely used web native formats like
 HTML/CSS is a safe bet. Backing up your notes as flat markdown files won't hurt
 either.
 
 Keeping your garden on the open web also sets you up to take part in the future
 of gardening. At the moment our gardens are rather solo affairs. We haven't
 figure out how to make them multi-player. But there's an enthusiastic community
 of developers and designers trying to fix that. It's hard to say what kind of
 libraries, frameworks, and design patterns might emerge out of that effort, but
 it certainly isn't going to happen behind a Medium paywall.
 
 A set of gardens with plant life moving between them
 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 
 This is all my take on gardening, but knowledge and neologisms always live
 within communities. 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.
 
 Want to share?Tell Twitter About It
 
 8 Backlinks
 
 The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
 
 Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content
 
 A Short History of Bi-Directional Links
 
 Seventy years ago we dreamed up links that would allow us to create two-way,
 contextual conversations. Why don't we use them on the web?
 
 Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks
 
 How to build a digital garden without touching code
 
 Transclusion and Transcopyright Dreams
 
 The lost permissioning and copyright system of the Web
 
 The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu
 
 Project Xanadu as a pattern language, rather than a failed software project
 
 Growing the Evergreens
 
 Illustrated notes on the concept of 'Evergreen notes' and how to write them
 
 A Meta-Tour of This Site
 
 A video tour through how I build the old version of this site
 
 Tending Evergreen Notes in Roam Research
 
 A walkthrough of how I manage and tend Evergreen notes in Roam
 
 Mentions around the web
 
 subterraneanwebZ
 a new hope
 with-heart
 Winson Tang
 Hacker News
 Abra Tusz
 King | "OG" Zettelkasten 🧠 2nd Brain 🚢
 HN Front Page
 ⎯ΘωΘ⟶
 lqdev
 Evgeny Kuznetsov
 Brad
 Brad
 Chris Aldrich
 DixOnGE
 talyssa
 Chris Krycho
 márcio moreira
 84 Likes and Retweets
 [47]wildrye.commentionedMarch 10, 2023
 Image by Pallangor, How to Make a Beautiful Minecraft GardenGarden of Infinite
 Possibilities Jorge Luis Borges’ story the “Garden of Forking Paths” is set in
 an elaborate garden, but the real garden is a book that is structured in such a
 way as to allow infinite possibilities.
 [48]wildrye.commentionedMarch 09, 2023
 Mike Caufield talks about his collection of notes in his wiki and how they work
 together as a rich network of ideas. Part of his method is to very carefully
 describe the relationship between two ideas when he builds his links. These
 descriptions become ideas in their own right.
 [49]Cristinamentionedin What the heck is a digital garden?March 04, 2023
 Digital gardens are a relatively new concept that are gaining popularity
 online. They are often described as a cross between a blog and a personal wiki.
 At its core, a digital garden is a place for someone to share their thoughts,
 ideas, and learning experiences in a more casual
 Whatdefang
 [50]WhatdefangmentionedFebruary 28, 2023
 Naming is a political act as much as a poetic one.
 Show 33 more
 
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 [53][54][55][56][57]
 © 2024 Maggie Appleton
 
   • [58]The Garden
   • [59]Essays
   • [60]About
   • [61]Notes
   • [62]Now
   • [63]Patterns
   • [64]Library
   • [65]Projects
   • [66]Colophon
 
 
 References:
 
 [1] https://maggieappleton.com/
 [3] https://maggieappleton.com/now
 [4] https://maggieappleton.com/about
 [6] https://maggieappleton.com/topics/digital-gardening
 [7] https://maggieappleton.com/topics/personal-knowledge
 [8] https://maggieappleton.com/topics/the-web
 [10] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#a-brief-history-of-digital-gardens
 [11] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#the-early-gardens-of-hypertext
 [12] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#digital-puttering-on-twitter
 [13] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#gardens-streams-and-caufield's-metaphors
 [14] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#carrying-on-caufield
 [15] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#digital-gardening's-fertile-soil
 [16] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#developer-led-gardening
 [17] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#the-six-patterns-of-gardening
 [18] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#1-topography-over-timelines
 [19] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#2-continuous-growth
 [20] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#3-imperfection-&-learning-in-public
 [21] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#4-playful-personal-and-experimental
 [22] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#5-intercropping-&-content-diversity
 [23] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#6-independent-ownership
 [24] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#a-brief-history-of-digital-gardens
 [25] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#the-early-gardens-of-hypertext
 [26] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#digital-puttering-on-twitter
 [27] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#gardens-streams-and-caufield's-metaphors
 [28] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#carrying-on-caufield
 [29] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#digital-gardening's-fertile-soil
 [30] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#developer-led-gardening
 [31] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#the-six-patterns-of-gardening
 [32] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#1-topography-over-timelines
 [33] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#2-continuous-growth
 [34] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#3-imperfection-&-learning-in-public
 [35] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#4-playful-personal-and-experimental
 [36] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#5-intercropping-&-content-diversity
 [37] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#6-independent-ownership
 [38] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#a-brief-history-of-digital-gardens
 [39] https://maggieappleton.com/neologisms
 [40] https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web
 [41] https://maggieappleton.com/nontechnical-gardening
 [42] https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals
 [43] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history#the-six-patterns-of-gardening
 [44] https://maggieappleton.com/pattern-languages
 [45] https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals
 [47] https://wildrye.com/what-is-a-digital-garden/
 [48] https://wildrye.com/the-digital-garden-as-an-experience-generator/
 [49] https://embersonthehearth.com/2023/03/04/what-the-heck-is-a-digital-garden/
 [50] https://twitter.com/whatdefang/status/1630464510740815872
 [53] https://github.com/MaggieAppleton
 [54] https://uk.linkedin.com/in/maggieappleton
 [55] https://dribbble.com/mappleton
 [56] https://twitter.com/Mappletons
 [57] https://indieweb.social/@maggie
 [58] https://maggieappleton.com/garden
 [59] https://maggieappleton.com/essays
 [60] https://maggieappleton.com/about
 [61] https://maggieappleton.com/notes
 [62] https://maggieappleton.com/now
 [63] https://maggieappleton.com/patterns
 [64] https://maggieappleton.com/library
 [65] https://maggieappleton.com/projects
 [66] https://maggieappleton.com/colophon