What is a Digital Garden?
You could say a blog is the traditional way to think about these internet homes. It is a place to publish kind-of serialised writing that is considered complete. It is the natural evolution of a magazine or a news outlet, once you add the distribution power and indivualisation of the internet.
A digital garden meanwhile, is different in that it isn’t serialised, and the published content doesn’t need to be complete. Of course, content is published somewhat chronologically, but you can post several unrelated things at once, they don’t need to have a “published date”, and there isn’t necessarily a feed of updates or latest posts. The way you navigate the garden isn’t chronological, it’s based on hyperlinks, on following your own interests like a “build your own adventure” book.
Similarly, in a digital garden the content can evolve, it’s not static. In a blog you could modify the content as well, but it’s not as common, it is more often seen as a small correction. Once you publish something, you barely touch it. In a digital garden, the things that are meant to be static are an exception, not the rule.
I find the idea of digital gardens compelling for those two reasons as well. I’ve always loved open-world games, and to me a digital garden feels like that. It’s chaotic and the structure is one made in connections, where the guide is the curiosity of the reader. And the fact that the content evolves, and that it is often unfinished, removes a layer of formality, makes the content feel more honest, more transparent. When I visit a digital garden, I kind of forget that I’m visiting a website on the internet, and I really start feeling like I’m visiting a place, a home that has grown organically, like I’m being invited to peak into someone’s mind.
Chuck Grimmet has a great explanation of it on his blog and recommends some essays on the concept:
- A collection of thoughts, ideas, highlights, annotations, quotes, summaries, and notes that are richer than a tweet, but lack the timestamped nature of a blog post or published essay.
- Digital gardens are tended to and evolve over time. Sometimes they grow, sometimes they get trimmed back. Though they change, they have the four-dimensional permanence of a river or Theseus’s Ship.
- A digital garden embodies the nature of working in public and learning out loud: Sharing your current understanding and allowing others to learn from it.
- Like entangled roots and interwoven vines, the individual plants of digital gardens form a latticework of bi-directionally linked content that supports and encourages bridging and pollination to further understanding.
Digital Gardens that have inspired me
How can I make one?
There’s lots of ways to make a digital garden, you could literally make one yourself with some rudimentary HTML and CSS.
The method I’m using is a static-site generator called Quartz, an Obsidian vault to manage the markdown content and Vercel free hosting. I like using this method because it is fully based on Javascript, so it is easy to customise and extend. However, it can be a bit hard to setup, and I’m still getting used to having more than one Obsidian vault.
If you care about simplicity, there is also a plugin that lets you publish notes directly from your Obsidian vault, making it really easy to start a garden simply by sharing your notes, but it is based on Eleventy and Nunjucks so it can be harder to customise if you’re not comfortable with those frameworks already. You can find the plugin with tutorials and examples here.