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.