Digital Gardens
The case for personal knowledge bases and digital gardens
Digital Gardens
A digital garden is a personal website that grows organically over time. Unlike a blog (reverse-chronological posts) or a portfolio (polished finished work), a digital garden contains ideas at various stages of development.
What Makes a Digital Garden?
Non-linear Structure
Gardens aren’t organized by date. They’re organized by topic, by connection, by whatever structure emerges from the content. You can start anywhere and follow links.
Working in Public
Garden posts aren’t finished essays. They’re thoughts in progress—seeds, sprouts, and mature plants growing together. The gardener tends them over time, adding, pruning, revising.
Bi-directional Links
Good digital gardens show you not just what a page links to, but what links to it. This creates a web of interconnected ideas, like neurons in a brain.
Epistemic Humility
Gardens often include status markers: “seedling”, “budding”, “evergreen”. Or confidence levels: “certain”, “likely”, “speculative”. This helps readers calibrate.
Why Build a Digital Garden?
For Yourself
- Learning: Writing clarifies thinking
- Memory: Externalize your knowledge
- Serendipity: Discover connections between ideas
- Compounding: Ideas grow more valuable over time
For Others
- Generosity: Share what you know
- Feedback: Others can improve your ideas
- Discovery: Help people find new perspectives
- Legacy: Leave something that outlasts you
Tools for Digital Gardening
Many tools support digital gardening:
- Obsidian: Local-first markdown editor with backlinks
- Roam Research: Pioneered networked note-taking
- Notion: Flexible but cloud-dependent
- TiddlyWiki: Oldest wiki for personal use
- Static sites: Hakyll, Hugo, Jekyll with plugins
The tool matters less than the practice.
Famous Digital Gardens
- Gwern.net - Perhaps the most extensive digital garden online
- Andy Matuschak’s notes - Working notes on knowledge work
- Maggie Appleton - Beautiful illustrated essays
- Tom Critchlow - Strategy consultant’s wiki
Getting Started
You don’t need special tools. Start with:
- A place to write (even a folder of text files)
- A habit of capturing ideas
- Regular review and connection
- Eventually, sharing with others
The garden grows from consistent attention, not perfect planning.
See also: On Long-term Thinking, About