PKM Wiki

Digital Gardens

3 min read

A digital garden is a publicly accessible collection of notes and ideas at various stages of development. Unlike a blog (which presents polished, chronological posts), a digital garden is organized by topic and link, with content ranging from rough seedlings to fully developed essays. It embodies the philosophy of "learning in public."

Origins and Philosophy

The term was popularized by Mike Caufield in his 2015 essay "The Garden and the Stream," which contrasted two modes of digital communication:

  • The Stream — Chronological feeds (Twitter, blogs, news). Content flows past; what matters is what is new. Encourages hot takes and polished performance.
  • The Garden — Topological spaces organized by connection, not time. Content is cultivated over time. Encourages exploration, revision, and thinking in progress.

Maggie Appleton later codified the digital garden ethos with six principles:

  1. Topography over timeline — Organized by topic and connection, not publish date
  2. Continuous growth — Notes are updated and revised, not frozen at publication
  3. Imperfection and learning in public — Content at all stages of development is acceptable
  4. Playful, personal, and experimental — Not corporate; reflects the author's personality
  5. Intercropping and diversity — Mixed content types (notes, essays, diagrams, links)
  6. Independent ownership — Hosted on your own domain, not on a platform

Growth Stages

Digital gardens often mark content with growth stages:

  • Seedling — Rough idea, barely developed. May be a single paragraph or a few bullet points.
  • Budding — Has some development but is not yet complete. Key ideas are present but need expansion.
  • Evergreen — Well-developed, regularly maintained, comprehensive. See Evergreen Notes.

This transparency about development stage is a defining characteristic. It gives readers permission to engage with work-in-progress ideas and gives authors permission to publish imperfect thoughts.

Relationship to PKM

A digital garden is essentially a PKM system with the "Share" step turned on. The internal knowledge graph becomes external. This creates several benefits:

  • Accountability — Public notes motivate better writing and thinking
  • Feedback — Readers spot errors, suggest connections, and build on ideas
  • Serendipity — Others find your garden and bring unexpected perspectives
  • Portfolio — A living demonstration of how you think, useful for career development

The risk is that publishing pressure distorts the PKM practice. Some knowledge workers find that the desire for polished public notes interferes with the rough, exploratory note-taking that makes PKM effective. The solution is to keep the public garden as a selected subset of a larger private system.

Notable Digital Gardens

  • Andy Matuschak (notes.andymatuschak.org) — Influential example of Evergreen Notes published as a digital garden
  • Maggie Appleton (maggieappleton.com/garden) — Visual, illustrated garden with growth stages
  • Gwern Branwen (gwern.net) — Extensively researched, long-form essays with confidence tags
  • Sébastien Dubois (notes.dsebastien.net) — Published via Obsidian Publish

Tools for Digital Gardens

  • Obsidian Publish — Publish selected notes from an Obsidian vault
  • Quartz — Static site generator designed for Obsidian vaults
  • Jekyll / Hugo — Static site generators with garden-friendly themes
  • TiddlyWiki — Self-contained wiki in a single HTML file
  • Notion — Can be published with Notion-to-site tools

Key Points

  • Digital gardens are public note collections organized by topic and connection, not timeline
  • Content at all development stages is acceptable; transparency about maturity is a feature
  • They are PKM with the "Share" step turned on
  • Learning in public creates accountability, feedback, and serendipity
  • Keep the public garden as a subset of a larger private system

Open Questions

  • Does publishing notes publicly improve or distort the PKM practice?
  • How do you handle updating content that others have linked to?

References

  • Mike Caufield, "The Garden and the Stream" (2015)
  • Maggie Appleton, "A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden" (2020)