## What is digital gardening?
In my opinion and in short : I think digital gardens as digital spaces where people grows their ideas from seed to tree : 🌱 -> ☘️ -> 🍀 -> 🌿 -> 🌲 -> 🎄
I discovered digital gardening in a total random way : While scrolling [my Github](https://github.com/anthonyamar) feed a repo called "[Knowledge](https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge)" sparked my curiosity.
When I clicked on it, I discover a lot of folders, each named by a subject, with awesome notes in their, a graph visualisation for connexions betweens notes, and also the term Digital Garden, which I didn't know the meaning.
Digital gardens seems trendy right now, but like any thing that seems trendy and totally new, it often had more ancient roots.
In her article [A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden](https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history), Maggie Appleton retrace the birth of the digital garden term in Mark Bernstein's 1998 manifestos [Hypertext Gardens](http://www.eastgate.com/garden/Enter.html). He expose his vision about how web navigation problems and structure's limits can be solved by what he called Hypertext Gardening.
> Gardens are farmland that delights the senses; parks are wilderness, tamed for our enjoyment. Large hypertexts and Web sites must often contain both parks and gardens.
> *-- Mark Bernstein*
It's, I think, difficult to get out a formal definition of what is or what is not a digital gardens, as it seems to have as much definition as gardening people.
I'm not a digital garden historian, but watching it with a new eye, it seems to be a crossbreeding of a blog, a Wiki and a (personal) [knowledge management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management) system, with influences of [Zettelkasten](The%20zettelkasten%20method%20and%20how%20to%20take%20smart%20notes.md) note-taking method.
I love how Maggie Appleton is placing digital gardens among other kind of text based expression systems, ==between the chaos streams and the cultivated performance==.
![](digital-garden.png)
## Why digital gardens?
For me, as I wrote it in [Welcome in my mind 🧠](Welcome%20in%20my%20mind%20%F0%9F%A7%A0.md), it's really the format and this mix of blog, wiki and PKM that feel great to me :
* Content over format
* No explicit or implicit rules, neither from the platform, neither from the community
* The technical simplicity : just Markdown, GitHub and Obsidian.
* Freely prioritize the content I create
* No chronology
* No mercantile aspect
* Muability over time
* Share the things I know and like to talk about, with or without consistency
* Connect topics and ideas that were initially very distant in a blink of an eye
* Allow people to dive deep into a wide variety of fields and engage with me about what spark their curiosity.
## Which tools?
Spoiler : This will not talk about rake, hoe and shovel.
Digital gardening come in lots of diffent flavours and are also made with a big variety of tools. Some are using custom made tools, other basic note taking apps with their own system or more "adapted" tools such as note taking apps that support bi-directional links like [Roam Research](https://roamresearch.com/) or [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/).
I started using the same stack as [Nikita Voloboev's Wiki](https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/) : [Gitbook](https://www.gitbook.com/) and Github. I was writing my notes with [Typora](https://typora.io/), sync it to my Github repository that will then be sync in Gitbook. It's great to start, even without Github and Typora, because Gitbook have its own WYSIWYG editor.
I recently change for [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/), that fit more my need because it handle bi-directional links, have many plugins to improve the workflow, custom CSS and a built-in service to publish notes into website. It's simple, yet powerful and very promising. It also have a supportive community with lot of people making gardens and developing plugins to make it more complete. I also love the Graph view plugin, that allows to browse notes from a graph perspective (you can watch my [Graph evolution](Graph%20evolution.md)) I'm completing it with Github and GitJournal on Android make my note taking workflow more mobile.
I also like the way people create their own website and tools for this. Such as [Ness Labs](https://nesslabs.com/), [Maggie Appleton](https://maggieappleton.com/garden) and [Joel Hooks](https://joelhooks.com/)
Obviously, finding the perfect tool is very difficult, but this isn't the point I think. The point is to write things with a process that fit your need, your style and what you want to share (or not, digital garden are not synonymous of sharing to the world).
## Links
- [Building a Second Brain - Maggie Appleton](https://maggieappleton.com/basb)