Digital gardens

A digital garden is a public, evergreen knowledge collection — the opposite of a chronological blog. Notes are tended (planted as seeds, grown, revised) instead of stamped with a date and abandoned. Maggie Appleton’s definition is the canonical one: collections of “essays, notes, talks, podcasts, and half-baked explorations I’m always tending to.”

Reference gardens

• Maggie Appleton — https://maggieappleton.com/garden — the canonical example. Seasonal log entries, growth stages (seedling/budding/evergreen — the vocabulary this vault borrows), “smidgeons” as micro-notes, explicit “Now updates”. Hers introduced the planting metaphor and stage taxonomy that most other gardens copy.
• Simon Späti (ssp.sh/brain) — https://www.ssp.sh/brain/ — public second brain “crafted, curated, connected, compounded”, modeled as digital Zettelkasten and garden. Strong Map of Content discipline (Data Engineering, PKM, Neovim…), built with Quartz. Notably transparent about tooling: he documents the stack (Obsidian vault → Quartz) in public notes.
• Andy Matuschak — https://notes.andymatuschak.org/ — working notes shared “with the garage door up”. Not a garden metaphor but the intellectual foundation: Evergreen notes, write for yourself by default, no index on purpose (follow links). Explicitly a personal thinking environment first, publication second.

Patterns worth stealing

• Growth stages over dates — seedling/budding/evergreen signals maturity, not recency; revisions update updated, not a new post.
• Maps of Content as front doors — ssp.sh curates MOCs per topic; Matuschak deliberately refuses an index. Middle path: folder notes + MOC maps.
• Public by default vs curated — Matuschak shares almost everything; Appleton curates; this vault publishes per-note via publish: true (explicit gate).
• Tooling transparency — ssp.sh publishes how the garden works; this vault does the same in How this garden works.

How this vault relates

This garden borrows all three: stage taxonomy from Appleton (used in status:), MOC discipline from Späti (maps/), evergreen-note philosophy from Matuschak (Evergreen notes). Publishing uses Quartz — the same engine as ssp.sh — via ~/projects/garden-site, gated per-note.

Ashcroft’s Zettelkasten viewer: the tree as first-class interface (2026-10-10)

m_ashcroft (148❤/6k views; 4-tweet thread + screenshots vision-transcribed): “I have vibe coded a Zettelkasten viewer, which solves the problem of seeing all of my notes as a flat list in Obsidian — now it’s much easier to navigate and see trains of thought.” The design is the lesson, a direct counter to Obsidian’s flat-file UX: a hierarchical Folgezettel tree (cards with Luhmann-style addresses 4.1 → 4.1b1a1, elbow connectors, cascade down-right) with focus mode — selected note + ancestry chain highlighted, siblings dimmed — and a detail panel structured as CHAIN / SEE / LINKED FROM (sequence position, lateral links, backlinks: the three Zettelkasten link types as three literal UI sections). Plus a Train button (spaced-repetition over the slip-box — the thinking-tool as memory-training rig) and an Obsidian jump button (viewer overlays the vault, doesn’t replace it). His comparison shot says the quiet part: the flat outline “much easier to make sense of than this” is what every large vault degrades into. For this vault: the garden’s graph view exists (Quartz explorer), but nothing renders chain discipline — the Folgezettel sequence this viewer makes navigable is the piece the vault only has implicitly via wikilink trails. Related lane: bob doto’s A System for Writing (Wishlist) is the same argument in book form — the @thehighpony recommendation in tweet 4/4 is that book’s lineage.

Späti’s counter-link: Branch Writing, the in-Obsidian branch UI (2026-10-10)

sspaeti (2-tweet reply thread to the Ashcroft viewer, captured; + Branch Writing page captured): “Might be relevant: Branch Writing” — Santi Younger’s paid Obsidian plugin that gives the writing side of the same branch problem a native answer: cards laid out visually inside the editor as you write (“see your structure as you write”), drag/shortcut moves, and “when you’re done, behind the scenes you already have normal paragraphs.” The mechanism is honest engineering worth noting: card boundaries are tracked by invisible comments in the document (hidden in reading view, absent from export). Späti’s second tweet adds the Zettelkasten bridge: the plugin “adds unique IDs for Zettelkasten notation” — i.e. Folgezettel addressing inside Obsidian, the exact feature Ashcroft built a whole separate viewer to recover. Three-way placement now complete in this note: Ashcroft = bespoke read-side tree (viewer over the vault), Branch Writing = write-side branching inside the vault (paid, plugin), this garden = neither, relying on folder structure + wikilinks + Quartz explorer — the flat-list problem Ashcroft tweeted about is real here too, currently answered by MOC discipline (Map of Content).