[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

Want to stay up to date?

Subscribe via RSS Feed
[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
