As set forth in:

A Brief History and Ethos of the Digital Garden

maggieappleton.com/garden-history (archive)

And inspired to action by:

The Brainrot Apocalypse (a DIY survival guide)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fj-OJ6RcNQ (archive)

I have planted a digital garden.

A digital garden is a curated collection of original content and hyperlinks that are of interest to the gardener. They’re organized somehow, in a way that is meaningful to the gardener. Digital gardens, like physical gardens, are for wandering through, exploring, getting lost, and discovering.

If you were on the internet in the 1900s, you experienced this on the early web before the rise of monolithic multinational platforms. If you missed it, perhaps you’ve ever browsed Wikipedia and clicked through link after link after link, ending up somewhere totally unrelated to your starting point… but connected. A digital garden is that experience writ small & with fewer rules. Opinions are allowed. There may or may not be “contribution standards.” There may be multiple, a single, or no theme. Go for a walk and find out!

Evergreen Notes

notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes (archive)

The fundamental units of this system are Evergreen Notes. These are units of knowledge that are designed to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across various projects. They are perpetually refined , constantly timely and relevant, and anchor entire knowledge networks.

In naming and defining a thing, you risk killing it… Many folks have written about digital gardens: what makes a good one, what makes a bad one, what counts as one, and what doesn’t count. The idea of “Evergreen Notes” is a good descriptor, I think, of the kind of enjoyable page that is often found in things that are experientially a “digital garden.”

Kind of like exploring Wikipedia - one page per “thing,” with lots of links out to concepts that get mentioned in a page. As you read a paragraph, you might see 10 words linked out to pages all about each of them, and you can choose your own adventure from there.

Now, if you haven’t clicked the “Evergreen Notes” link above, I highly recommend it! I can’t believe I’ve never seen a site like this before. The way internal links work is bonkers - in a good way. There’s a tall column on the left with the content, and lots of internal links. When you hover over a link, a little card pops up with a preview, and when you click… it appears in a new column to the right. The old column is still there. This just repeats - your path of exploration is visually there, and you can easily read up and down all the history of the path you took. This means that two different visitors arriving at the same page will likely have radically different content on the screen in front of them - a reflection of their personal journey. How cool!

I want that! It won’t work perfectly for this garden as it is right now, but maybe I can do it someday. Or, really, I want a web browser that does that for me… a mode that automatically does “reading mode” and opens links in new columns in a tab.

This is maybe closer to a related concept - zettelkasten - than Digital Gardening specifically.

Zettelkasten

zettelkasten.de/ (archive)

Zettelkasten explores a rigorous system of building a web of knowledge out of what are functionally Evergreen Notes (zettel) with options for increasingly-broad notes built on top to help direct and connect. Zettel are mostly single-concept notes, though - the traditional Wikipedia article that does cover “one topic” but many aspects of a topic, pushes the boundaries of the Zettelkasten structure.

Not all Zettelkasten collections may be a digital garden, but browsing someone’s Zettelkasten can end up as a digital garden experience, on account of the principles of connectivity (“hypertext” used unironically and correctly) they advocate. There will be connections all over the place, and if you wander through, you’ve found a path through a garden.