Back in the spring of 20215ya I stopped publishing to a blog and started keeping a digital garden instead. This is a placeholder essay about why, and about the people who worked the soil long before I arrived.
A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that are not strictly organised by their publication date. They are exploratory by nature. Notes are linked through contextual associations. They are not refined or complete, and they are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow over time. The caretaking roles on early shared wikis had names. People who cleaned up broken links and awkward white space were called gardeners.
It is a different way of thinking about our online behaviour around information. One that accumulates personal knowledge over time in an explorable space, like the notes in A Garden, Not a Feed
Why I stopped publishing to timelines and started tending a slow, imperfect collection of notes
A Brief History of Digital Gardens
The idea is older than most of the tools we now use to build it. If we want to understand where gardening is going, it helps to know where the first seeds came from.
The Early Gardens of Hypertext
The term first appeared in the late nineties, in essays about hypertext and how to design sites that people could wander through. The early writers treated a website as a landscape. They wanted paths, landmarks, and room to get a little lost.
That early writing was about wayfinding. It did not yet describe a personal publishing practice. The modern meaning arrived later, and it arrived through social media.
Digital Puttering on Social Media
A decade later the phrase resurfaced in short posts about personal wikis. Most of those posts are gone now, which is its own argument for publishing on your own site first . People described "puttering" in their notes: tidying links, fixing attributions, and pruning pages that no longer held up.
Puttering is a good word for it. The work is small, regular, and never finished.
A garden is never finished. That is the point of having one.
Gardens and Streams
The clearest framing came from a talk that set the garden against the stream. The stream is the timeline. It is a single flow of posts that only makes sense in order. The garden is a space you can walk through in any direction.
The Core Claim
“The garden is the web as topology. The stream is the web as timeline. We built far too much of the second one.”
Both are useful. The argument is only that we overbuilt the stream, and that most personal sites copied its shape without asking why.
Developer-led Gardening
The current wave is led by developers and designers, mostly because the tools still demand it. Static site builders, Markdown files, and a little glue code are the usual kit. I describe my own setup in the colophon.
- Notes live as plain files in a repository.
- Links between notes are resolved when the site builds.
- Every page shows when it was planted and when it was last tended.
The Six Patterns of Gardening
After reading a few hundred gardens, the same six patterns keep appearing. None of them are rules. They are habits that make a garden feel like a garden.
1. Topography over Timelines
Gardens are organised around contextual relationships and associative links. The publication date is not the most important detail of a piece of writing.
Navigation follows topics, Breadcrumb History
Giving people a visible, useful trail of where they have been over an exploratory journey
2. Continuous Growth
Gardens are never finished. They grow, change, and get pruned. A post is not a final statement. It is the current state of a thought. I keep a changelog for the largest essays so the edits stay visible.
3. Imperfection and Learning in Public
Gardens are imperfect by design. They do not hide their rough edges or claim to be a permanent source of truth. I wrote more about the cost of that in Learning in Public Without Losing Your Mind
Notes from five years of publishing half-formed ideas on the open web
The growth stage on each page is the honest part. A seedling tells you to read with care. An evergreen tells you I will defend it.
4. Playful, Personal, and Experimental
Gardens are non-homogenous by nature. You can plant the same seeds as your neighbour and still get a different arrangement. The point of owning the space is that you may do strange things with it.
5. Content Diversity
A garden is not only a collection of interlinked words. Podcasts, diagrams, talks, sketches, and small tools all belong. Historically, monocropping has been a bad idea.
6. Independent Ownership
Gardening is about claiming a small patch of the web for yourself. One you fully own and control. It should not live on the servers of a company whose incentives will change.
This is my take on gardening, but knowledge and neologisms always live within communities. No one owns The Official Definition. Many people have added to the conversation and you should read their thoughts as well.