A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

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.

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

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.

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... See more

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 p... See more

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. I... See more

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.

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