What is a “Digital Garden”?
I hope the term “digital garden” doesn’t confuse you too much or scare you away from browsing my website. But if you’re here, you’re probably curious enough to learn more.
A digital garden is a personal knowledge website that grows over time as the author cultivates ideas.
I discovered digital gardens through using Obsidian. I started using it as a space to take notes and capture thoughts. It’s fully customizable, functions in a way that aligns with how I think, and doesn’t make me feel constrained. This freedom facilitates an ease in learning and connecting ideas.
There are so many ways to build an Obsidian vault and digital garden. I initially tried the botanical classification system for my notes: they begin as “seedlings,” and the more you tend to them, the more they mature into fully grown flowers or trees that make up the garden (or forest, or jungle). It’s a fun framework, but it’s not how I personally organize things.
My Approach to Digital Gardens
I simply write, collect ideas, and share — messily, somewhat unorganized, at least for now. Right when I was craving the internet of the past — weird, personal, unpolished — I found digital gardens. They spoke to me because of the way it could be whatever it is that I wanted.
My particular digital garden is a web project and experiment in learning in public. It’s part blog, part portfolio, and part playground. Like me, it’s always evolving. Never quite finished. A digital garden is a place to embrace curiosity, create and share.
The more it grows and expands, the more it’ll start to feel like exploring and wandering — and, I hope, a space that invites discovery.
I hope that you revisit in a few weeks! I restarted my vault after a tragic data loss so this is just the beginning.
Inspiration for my Digital Garden:
Thankful for these two in providing an example of what a digital garden can look like. Even though they won’t feature me because I didn’t use Obsidian Publish, you can view other digital gardens here.
Further Reading on Digital Gardens:
- A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton