digital garden

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A digital garden is a particular practice of creating & growing an online and public IndieWeb presence that focuses more on topics & relationships than a timeline like blogs, has content of different levels of development, is imperfect and often a playground for experimentation, learning, revising, iteration, and growth for diverse content, perhaps interlinked with other digital gardens.

Similar personal site structures:

• commonplace book
• Zettelkästen

Common Patterns

In her 2020 essay A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden, Maggie Appleton observed that digital gardens shared the following six patterns, many of which help distinguish them from blogs, other forms of personal websites, or especially anything hosted on a corporate domain.

1. 📑 Topography over Timelines
2. 🌱🌿 Continuous Growth
3. 🍂 Imperfection & Learning in Public
4. 🎍 Playful, Personal, and Experimental
5. 🌾 Intercropping & Content Diversity
6. 🪴 Independent Ownership

Relation to commonplace book

A digital garden is similar to a commonplace book, or sometimes considered a variant of the more generic meanings thereof. However in practice those that publish, grow, and curate a digital garden explicitly by name do so with common attributes that are not common to all "commonplace books" which is enough to distinguish digital gardens as their own thing.

IndieWeb Examples

• tw2113 has a digital garden built on WordPress at https://digitalgarden.tech/

• Maxime Vaillancourt has a digital garden at https://maximevaillancourt.com/notes built with Jekyll and Netlify with an article about how to replicate it at https://maximevaillancourt.com/blog/setting-up-your-own-digital-garden-with-jekyll as well as a demo template at https://digital-garden-jekyll-template.netlify.app/ and an open source version on Github at https://github.com/maximevaillancourt/digital-garden-jekyll-template

• Tracy Durnell has a digital garden at https://tracydurnell.com/mind-garden/ using WordPress

• Evan Boehs is using his blog as an entry way into his digital garden

• Kimberly Hirsh uses her blog as a commonplace book and her website pages as a digital garden.

Examples in the wild

• Alan Smith, example of a "digital garden" which actually looks like a garden view from above with various plots of content

• https://garden.colingorrie.com/ describes itself as a digital garden

• Rishikesh Sreehari, self-identifying digital garden built using Hugo

Software

• Jekyll - see details about how to do this at Setting up your own digital garden with Jekyll

• https://anagora.org/, an open source community-based digital garden project

• Quartz, https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/, a Hugo, GitHub, and Obsidian-based set up for self-hosting one's online digital garden

Community resources

• Digital Gardeners Telegram group
• Spreadsheet of digital gardens related to Anne-Laure Le Cunff's Digital Gardners Telegram Group. Started by Bill Seitz.

Articles

Articles and tweetstorms about digital gardens:

• 1998 Mark Bernstein: Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas (archived)
  • A foundational text for the idea of the digital garden

• 2015-10-17 Mike Caulfield: The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral (archived)

• 2018-07-13 Alan Jacobs: The Blog Garden (archived)

• 2018-10-10 Tom Critchlow: Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens: Building personal learning environments across the different time horizons of information consumption (archived)

• 2019-02-24 Joel Hooks: 🌱 My blog is a digital garden, not a blog (archived)

• 2020-02-25 Shawn Wang: Digital Garden Terms of Service (archived)

• 2020-04-15 exploratory thread: https://twitter.com/Mappletons/status/1250532315459194880
  • "Nerding hard on digital gardens, personal wikis, and experimental knowledge systems with @_jonesian today.
    
    We have an epic collection going, check these out...
    
    1. @tomcritchlow's Wikifolders: https://tomcritchlow.com/wiki/" @Mappletons April 15, 2020
  • https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1250532315459194880.html

• 2020-04-22 Anne-Laure Le Cunf: You and your mind garden (archived)

• 2020-05-08 Informal definition of digital garden in the wild:
  • "In many digital gardens (basic def: public personal wiki, densely hyperlinked within itself, looser than a blog), you'll notice that if you hover your mouse over a link, it shows you a preview of the page it links to. BeSci/HCI explain why this is great 👇 https://twitter.com/JoshWComeau/status/1249028653985513472" —@RobertHaisfield May 8, 2020

• 2020-05-13 will stedden: The Swale: Weaving between Garden and Stream (archived)

• 2020-05-20 Maxime Vaillancourt: Setting up your own digital garden with Jekyll (archived)

• 2020-06-10 Maggie Appleton: A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

• 2020-09-03 Tanya Basu (MIT Technology Review): Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet: A growing number of people are creating individualized, creative sites that eschew the one-size-fits-all look and feel of social media

• 2020-11-06 Tracy Durnell: Thinking Better with My Mind Garden (archived)

• 2021-04-26 Maggie Appleton: Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks (archived)
  • Looks at and compares using Notion, Obsidian and Roam Research for hosting

• 2020-05-28 Thread: https://twitter.com/Mappletons/status/1398333237945147399
  • "I’ve been tended a long post on the history of “Digital Gardening” over the last year. From @holden's original essay to the recent explosion of community experiments.
    
    🌿 https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
    
    Included six design patterns I see as unifying qualities across gardens:" @Mappletons May 28, 2021

• 2021-07-03 Chris Aldrich: Differentiating online variations of the Commonplace Book: Digital Gardens, Wikis, Zettlekasten, Waste Books, Florilegia, and Second Brains (archived)

• 2021-07-09 Rishikesh Sreehari: How I built my Digital Garden using Hugo

Criticism

• "Too many “Digital Gardens” end up as not much more than a record of someone dicking around with their note-taking workflow for a couple of months."—Jack Baty June 16, 2021
• "people normally like calling their personal wikis a "personal garden". to me, it feels wrong. i don't write for meticulous care & growth, ... that's no garden. it's a mortal abyss. and i find a lot of meaning staring into it." https://abyss.j3s.sh/hypha/digital_abyss

Previously

This page used to redirect to commonplace book, and there were a lot of resources there specific to digital gardens that were moved to this page, as part of splitting off digital garden from commonplace book.

See Also

• garden and stream
• commonplace book
• Digital gardens should have bugs. https://twitter.com/tomcritchlow/status/1484234289424314371
  • "amazing! so glad my code was useful please steal liberally though of course I'm not a great coder so.... bugs included (guess a good garden has bugs?!)" @tomcritchlow January 20, 2022
• Much of this applies to organizing your own personal digital gardens as well: https://dkb.io/post/organize-the-world-information
• Example of a digital garden using Notion with a personal domain https://glenn.thedixons.net/
• https://wiki.nikiv.dev/, an example of a personal digital garden/wiki written in Markdown with a longer description of its build at https://wiki.nikiv.dev/other/wiki-workflow
• https://github.com/aravindballa/github-issues-garden a project that uses Github issues/comments to build a digital garden
• Garden of another sort: https://bloggy.garden/
• 2023-07-06 Being an imperfect gardener of my digital garden
• 2023-08-30 My Own Digital Garden On The Web
• 2024-04-23 Planning to Plant a Plot

  It’s one thing to say I’m going to do a digital garden. It’s another thing entirely to decide what I want that to mean. I could go down countless rabbit holes researching the _right_ way to set up a digital garden. Or I could just look at what my neighbors are doing.