Digital gardens

January 29, 2026

The digital garden metaphor appeals to me because it captures something essential about how knowledge actually develops — not as a linear sequence of polished publications, but as a branching, interconnected web of ideas at various stages of maturity.

The Garden vs. the Stream

Mike Caufield’s distinction between the “garden” and the “stream” remains the clearest articulation of why this matters. The stream is the timeline, the feed, the reverse-chronological flow of content that dominates how we consume information online. The garden is spatial, associative, and accumulative. You don’t scroll through a garden — you wander.

For researchers, the stream model maps onto the publication pipeline: write a paper, submit it, revise, publish, move on. The garden model maps onto something closer to how research thinking actually works: you have a cluster of related ideas, some well-developed, some embryonic. You tend them over time. Some grow into papers; others remain useful scaffolding that never gets formalized but shapes your thinking in important ways.

Evergreen Notes

Andy Matuschak’s concept of “evergreen notes” — atomic, densely linked, and continuously revised — resonates with how I try to maintain research notes. A good note should be:

Concept-oriented rather than book-oriented or project-oriented. The unit of knowledge is the idea, not the source from which you encountered it.

Densely linked. The value of notes increases superlinearly with the density of connections between them. Isolated notes are nearly worthless; it’s the network that matters.

Written in your own words. Copying passages from papers doesn’t constitute understanding. The act of reformulating an idea in your own language is where learning happens.

Continuously maintained. Unlike blog posts, which are published and abandoned, evergreen notes should be revisited and revised as your understanding deepens.

Implications for Research

I’ve found that maintaining a digital garden alongside my formal research practice has several benefits. It creates a low-friction outlet for ideas that aren’t ready for publication but are worth developing. It makes connections between disparate reading and thinking visible. And it provides a kind of intellectual archaeology — you can look back and trace how your understanding of a topic evolved over time.

The tension between the garden and the academy is real, though. Academic incentives reward polished, finished products. A garden full of half-formed thoughts and speculative connections looks, from the outside, like a mess. There’s a vulnerability in working in public at this level of incompleteness.

Tools and Practice

The specific tooling matters less than the practice. I’ve used everything from plain text files to sophisticated knowledge management applications. What persists is the habit of writing things down, linking them together, and revisiting them periodically. The tool should get out of the way of this process, not complicate it.