The Six Patterns of Digital Gardening

1. Topography over Timelines

Gardens are organised around contextual relationships and associative links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it's connected to others.

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2. Continuous Growth

Gardens are never finished, they're constantly growing, evolving, and changing. Just like a real soil, carrot, and cabbage garden.

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3. Imperfection & Learning in Public

Gardens are imperfect by design. They don't hide their rough edges or claim to be a permanent source of truth.

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4. Playful, Personal, and Experimental

Digital gardens should be just as unique and particular as their vegetative counterparts. The point of a garden is that it's a personal playspace. You organise the garden around the ideas and mediums that match your way of thinking, rather than off someone else's standardised template.

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5. Intercropping & Content Diversity

...we're living in an audio-visual cornucopia that the web makes possible. Podcasts, videos, diagrams, illustrations, interactive web animations, academic papers, tweets, rough sketches, and code snippets should all live and grow in the garden.

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6. Independent Ownership

Gardening is about claiming a small patch of the web for yourself, one you fully own and control.

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Maggie Appleton, A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden (2020)

• digital gardening