A digital garden is a website you tend instead of publish. That distinction sounds precious until you notice how much it changes.
A blog is a stream. Posts are dated, ordered newest first, and finished at the moment they go up. Nobody goes back and rewrites a post from 2023, so the whole archive slowly becomes a record of things you used to think. A garden has no feed and no chronology. Notes link to each other, get revisited, get rewritten in place, and the structure emerges from the connections rather than from a calendar.
I came to this backwards, which is worth admitting on a page about working in the open. I was reading about Quartz, the thing this site runs on, hit a post by its author Jacky Zhao, and the phrase “digital garden” landed hard enough that I went looking for where it came from. I had not read any of the below first.
Turns out the idea is a lot older than the current wave of it. Mark Bernstein was writing about hypertext gardens in 1998, which is apparently the first time anyone used the word for this: “Gardens lie between farmland and wilderness. The garden is farmland that delights the senses, designed for delight rather than commodity.” Mike Caulfield’s The Garden and the Stream from 2015 is the one most people point at, and it names the tension properly: the stream is the timeline, the feed, the endless now, and the garden is the thing you actually build. Maggie Appleton’s A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden is where I got most of the above, and it is better than this paragraph.
So: read those, not me, if you want the real history. What follows is just my take on it.
Why it landed
Two reasons, and only one of them is about websites.
The first is permission. If a note has to be finished before it’s public, then nothing is ever public, because nothing is ever finished. Calling it a garden moves the bar from complete to planted, which is low enough to actually clear on a Tuesday evening.
The second is that I work on several things at once, deliberately. It’s how I avoid stalling out. A blog punishes that: an interleaved feed of half-topics reads as incoherent. A garden doesn’t care. Notes about embedded systems and notes about databases can sit next to each other and the graph sorts out what’s actually related.
Where I diverge
Partly this is just taste, and I would rather say so than dress it up as methodology. I like wizards and alchemy and dusty shelves of labelled bottles a lot more than I like potting sheds. Gardening is a good metaphor and it is also everybody else’s; if this is going to be my corner of the internet it may as well smell like mine.
The part that isn’t taste: gardening has no good word for a thing you got wrong and want to keep. A plant that dies gets composted. But a note recording a wrong approach is one of the most useful things in here, and “compost” makes it sound like waste.
Alchemy has that word. A failed batch is an ordinary outcome of the work, not an embarrassment. You write down what went in, what came out, and what you’d change. So this is an apothecary: reagents get gathered, tinctures steep, elixirs earn a place on the shelf, and failed batches stay labelled with the reason. Same idea as a garden, with a first-class name for being wrong.
The tending metaphor survives intact underneath it. Things here get returned to, reworked, and occasionally left to spoil.
See the bench for what those four states mean in practice.
If you want one
Quartz is free, MIT licensed, and builds a static site out of a folder of markdown, so there’s no database and no runtime. Obsidian plus one of the publish plugins gets you there too. So does a hand-rolled static site generator, which is how most of the early ones worked.
The tooling matters far less than the shift, and the shift is this:
The whole point
Stop trying to finish things before you show them.