What is a digital garden?
A digital garden is a personal website for half-finished thinking. Unlike a blog — which is chronological, polished, and final — notes in a garden are tended, revised, and linked to each other as ideas develop.
The metaphor is deliberate: ideas are planted as seedlings, grow into budding drafts, and eventually mature into evergreens that you’d stand behind. None of them are “done” in the way a blog post is.
Why
- Lower bar to publishing. If it doesn’t have to be finished, it gets written.
- Ideas compound. Linking notes together creates a map that’s more useful than any individual note.
- Search surfaces your past self. A year later, this is your second brain.
How this garden works
- Each note lives in
_notes/<slug>.md. - Link between notes using ordinary markdown links — the notes index and the backlinks note explain more.
state:front matter is one ofseedling,budding, orevergreen.
Reading on digital gardens
- Maggie Appleton — “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden”
- Andy Matuschak — “Evergreen notes”
- Tom Critchlow — “Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens”