What is a Digital Garden?

I understand my Digital Garden as a collection of free form, interconnected & evolving ideas that grow over time. Like plants grow in a real-world garden.

Coming up with ideas of what to write about or sharing the necessary information to e.g. explain a concept isn’t too hard. During a normal workday or also in my free time there’s enough input of what to write about — it’s also easy enough to share a code snippet and a short paragraph of why, what & how. That’s never the problem. After reading A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden (opens in a new tab) & My blog is a digital garden, not a blog (opens in a new tab) it became clear to me that I haven’t written as much as I could. I saw my blog as this place for only highly polished, lengthy articles that have a certain “quality” standard. It’s really hard to wrap the information into enough context so that the target audience can follow your train of thought, that it’s entertaining and/or interactive.

Digital Gardens are imperfect by design. They also allow for playful or more experimental content that doesn’t need to be “finished” or “perfect”. It can evolve over time, get pruned, reshaped or even removed if it doesn’t fit anymore. This is a very different mindset than the traditional blog or article writing approach where you try to create the “perfect” piece of content from the start.