What is a Digital Garden?

The gardening analogy to hypertext and online writing has been around for a long time. Hypertext pioneers such as Cathy Marshall and Mark Bernstein saw that the new medium demanded a different set of skills and process than from traditional publishing. These skills were much more like gardening than production work.

But the text that seems to have kicked off today’s mini-Renaissance in digital gardening is Mike Caulfield’s post The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral, where he argues that just as a feature in a garden, say a small bridge, can be approached from different angles and leave different impressions, so can a hypertext.

What Makes a Digital Garden?

1. Links Create a Sense of “Place”

Mike Caulfield suggests that by thoughtfully linking posts you can create new ideas. In this way as you travel from post to post you get a distinct train of thought. But if you were to take a different path through the posts and links, you would get a different train of thought. He says this is analogous to walking through a large garden. One path leaves you with one set of views and impressions, but a different path can give you a very different experience.

You can visualize this sense of place by picturing a note in a knowledge graph. The relationships built by the links position this particular note in a particular space.

2. Notes Have a Lifecycle

Andy Matuschack proposed the idea of “Evergreen Notes” (here explained visually by Maggie Appleton), or notes that grow and improve over time.

The process of cultivating these notes is a little bit like gardening: first you plant, then you water and prune. Maggie Appleton identifies the lifecycle stage of her notes with an icon of a sprout or plant.

3. The Garden Exists in a Landscape

Caulfield notes that his own note system is maintained on a federated wiki. This makes it easier to link notes and maintain backlinks. It also makes it easier to share notes and engage with the notes of others. But he is careful to say that it isn’t the software that brings life to the garden, it is the way the garden is cultivated.

That said, in the same way that a garden will have focal points, borders, ground covers, and paths, a digital garden will be stronger when it can show the relationships between the parts and how they contribute to the whole.

Gwern Branwen’s website lists the newest and most popular of her articles. It also lists articles by topic. To track the lifecycle of her incremental writings you can visit a changelog. There is so much content on her site, the articles are so dense and thought-provoking, that the “landscaping,” the outlines and the other context helps establish how the parts work together as a whole.