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← Notes evergreen

What is a digital garden?

200 words · ~1 min read

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 of seedling, budding, or evergreen.

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”

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