Intro to digital gardening: a quietly public way of sharing ideas

Reasons to start a digital garden, tools I recommend, and ways to keep it casual

Welcome to SEE YOU—a companion for artists, thinkers, and analog lovers with ideas, inspiration, and reflections on living an intentional creative life.

Today I am writing about digital gardening—what it is, why to try it, and how you can start tending your own. This post is part of Quietly Public, a series about sharing without performing one’s self on the internet. Join to follow along!

My digital garden

Digital gardening is a web-based playground for your ideas. Your digital garden can be your personal encyclopedia, your commonplace notebook, your moodboards and post it notes combined.

You can collect and harvest notes from various media (books, articles, films, podcasts, TV) and formulate seeds of thought for future articles. You can write in any direction, repeatedly edit posts, and share it all in a quietly public manner.

Before I dive into the details of my setup and address commonly asked questions, I’d like to first convince you to start tending your own digital garden.

5 reasons to start a digital garden

1. It helps you reclaim your attention from social media

While reading this week’s New York Magazine feature on getting off your phone, I came across this quote by science journalist Michaeleen Doucleff:

Gardening is like “social media methadone. You create a huge amount of dopamine when you see progress, and social media gives us that with likes and engagement. It allows you to check something all the time. Gardening gives me that progress—the plants grow! There is no end to the progress on social media, but the end for gardening is when I eat the cucumber.”

Doucleff is referring to a literal garden, but I’d argue that a digital garden provides much of the same benefits. You can check in on your digital garden instead of scrolling a social media feed. You can engage in tiny acts of tending, like making connections between notes, adding a new source, or trimming what is no longer relevant. You get pleasure as you see your digital garden expand and grow. The “cucumber” reward is creating a new essay or artwork based on the contents of your garden.

2. It helps you remember what you consume

I am a chronic note taker because I will truly forget anything that I don’t write down. Even if I do write something down, I will likely forget having written it within a week or two. This is all fine and well for tasks and to dos, but when it comes to interesting information and ideas, I want to store them all. I want to easily stumble upon old ideas and let them mingle with the new.

This is where digital gardening comes in! I still use notebooks for commonplace purposes, physically writing down quotes and ideas. I will periodically transfer these notes to my digital garden (every week if I’m on top of things, every month if I’ve been slacking). I have many notebooks and use them chaotically without indices, so this transferring system helps me retain my notes and know where to find things.

3. It helps you form your opinions in public

On the internet I am often drowning in a sea of other people’s opinions. I feel this acutely when on social cataloging sites like Goodreads or Letterboxd, full of book or film reviews ranging from witty and insightful to utterly spiteful and eyeroll-worthy.

Reading reviews or comments before forming my own opinion is a habit that has trashed my critical thinking brain. Digital gardening helps me recover by giving me a quietly public space to develop my own observations and judgments on a piece of work. It provides that necessary gap between reaction and response—a place where I can stand by my opinion without considering other people first.

4. It helps you think non-linearly and non-chronologically

The internet was created to be easily editable, but we’ve veered far from this pattern with our online sharing now. When I write my newsletter, I treat each post as a final draft. The same goes for social media posts (consider the internal debate of whether to re-upload a post that has a big typo when it’s already getting engagement!) This deadline-driven way of sharing can be helpful for finishing things, but it hurts the public development of nascent ideas.

Digital gardening provides a way to casually think. Some of my notes are just one sentence and an attribution, like this note on inscape. Dates are merely a piece of metadata, not the sorting function of how posts are displayed (as they are on a blog or a newsletter). Nothing about my garden is “final.” It will always be ever-growing and evolving.

5. It helps you recycle and combine ideas

My digital gardening is driven by stumbling upon interesting tidbits of information. When I come across something that is related to a specific project, I put it in a dedicated project file in Notion. When I don’t know what the idea is for, then it goes in my digital garden.

Collecting disparate ideas in this way might seem wasteful, but it all becomes compost material for generating ideas in the future. Becoming an interesting thinker comes from combining various thoughts, spiraling towards new ideas through deep consideration of old ones.

My digital garden history & setup

I first heard about digital gardening in 2020 from this (iconic! timeless!) essay on digital gardening by Maggie Appleton. I experimented with gardening through Gatsby, a React-based coding framework, then promptly ditched it within a month, preferring to focus my energy on writing this newsletter. Digital gardening came into my life again last summer with Anna Howard’s digital gardening episodes on her Wild Geese podcast. Thoroughly inspired, I set up a new digital garden and began the process of gathering my media notes and documenting my ideas.

I currently do my digital gardening with Obsidian, a free desktop app for note taking and personal knowledge management. I love that Obsidian works completely offline. All my notes (which are formatted as Markdown files) remain permanently on my computer, so I never have to worry about exporting or losing my data.

A few months ago I found a way to easily share my digital garden on the web through Quartz, a static site generator developed by Jacky Zhao. This requires a bit of setup, like having a Github account and modifying code files, but is completely free and worth trying if you use Obsidian. Setup took me about an hour; I think a coding newbie could do it in a day following documentation or this video tutorial.

The left sidebar shows the organizing structure; the right sidebar houses each page’s table of contents and backlinks

My digital garden has a light organizing structure:

• Collections for lists, like fascinating words or medicinal properties of plants

• Concepts for developed thoughts formulated by other thinkers

• How to for instructions on doing things

• One sentence beliefs for my main notes—the folder title serves as a reminder that each note should contain one idea, ideally captured in one sentence

• Source notes for observations on various media, including books, film, workshops, and video essays

You do not need an organizing structure at all! Obsidian does not demand any structure, compared to hierarchical note taking apps like Notion. Some digital gardeners throw all their notes into the top level folder, connecting notes through backlinks (referencing other notes through double brackets) and tags (keywords to group notes).

FAQ on digital gardening

Do I have to use Obsidian? What other digital gardening tools do you recommend?

Before giving advice on which tool to use, I’d first ask whether you prioritize curating and organizing content, or whether you want to develop and evolve your thoughts. Tools are usually stronger in one area over the other. Of course, you can go rogue and DIY your digital garden on your own website, but the following tools provide helpful structure and functionality to get you started:

➡️ To curate and organize content:

Are.na is an independent, ad-free tool for saving things from the internet and organizing them into channels. You can also link channels to other people’s channels and create delicious interlinking rabbit holes. I love browsing Are.na as a leisure activity. Laurel Schwulst and Celine Nguyen are two of my go two inspirations.

I use my own Are.na (not very often) for abstract imagery, like diagrams and design inspiration. For my illustration practice I still use Pinterest as it aligns more with my visual aesthetic.

Sublime is a freemium, ad-free tool similar to Are.na but with added functionality, including Canvas whiteboards and AI-driven search tools. Most of these extra functions are unlocked with a paid plan.

One thing I like about Sublime is that you can add new information without assigning it a categorization. It can also sync with Instagram saved posts (a thing I would never check otherwise!) For inspiration, check out founder Sari’s page.

➡️ To develop and evolve thought:

Apps for “thinking” generally fall under PKMS, which stands for personal knowledge management system. Obsidian falls under this category, but the following two suggestions are more image-friendly and ~aesthetic~ if that’s your vibe.

The most popular PKMS tool (imo) is Notion. Last week I shared Chloe Almeda’s hybrid-digital garden/world which mixes her media notes and developing thoughts with journal entries. For a more straightforward example of a digital garden, I love this one by Harley Claes ☾⋆⁺₊✧⋆࿔.

I personally don’t use Notion for digital gardening because it’s hard to see all my notes at once, therefore I’m unlikely to re-discover past notes and make new connections. Notion also has limited SEO capability compared to Obsidian & Quartz—important to consider if you’d like to make your digital garden public.

Capacities is another tool that folks use for digital gardening. I haven’t personally tried it, but it solves that nested hierarchical problem that Notion has. Check out Wesley Anna and Ella Nym’s videos on how they digital garden in Capacities.

How much time do you spend on digital gardening?

Digital gardening is not a quick one-and-done process, much like real life gardening. It’s also not the same as creating a new piece of work, much like documenting the lifestyle of being an artist is not the same as actually making art. JA Westenberg’s post on deleting their second brain is a great reminder of the trap of over-processing knowledge in lieu of presence and attention.

The only rigor I apply to my digital garden is writing source notes for books that made me think or reflect a lot. Usually this applies for nonfiction books, where I am annotating and making lots of connections.

Otherwise, I’ll drop into my digital garden for 1-3 hours each week to transfer ideas out of my notebooks. Some thoughts I write are fleeting and purposeless; others are worthy of planting as seeds. Most of the new notes I add from these transfer sessions fall into Concepts or One Sentence Beliefs.

On occasion I’ll get inspired while reading articles or watching videos online and drop directly into my digital garden. Usually this comes in the form of connecting new information to an idea already in my garden.

For example, I edited this idea about categories flattening and aiding understanding this week after reading Elizabeth Goodspeed’s It’s Nice That article about categorizing aesthetics. Rather than taking notes on the entire article, I jotted down only what I thought was relevant to the note’s topic.

Is Obsidian good with image boards? (asked by darius/dare carrasquillo and patricia tiffany)

Obsidian has a Canvas feature that allows for easy board creation, mixing notes, texts, and image attachments. I don’t really use this feature, but I gave it a whirl to answer this question.

Obsidian canvas example

Dragging and dropping in images was very easy, as was grouping and linking different sections through arrows. But there’s no way to easily crop images! For this reason alone, I would not recommend Obsidian for heavy image/mind mapping use. tldraw, Excalidraw, Figma, or Milanote all make better alternatives.

Do you write newsletter posts directly in your digital garden? What are some cucumbers that have grown from your garden?

The first Substack piece I wrote using my digital garden was Before you lose the urge.

Before you lose the urge

In my digital garden, this note is titled “don’t delay expressing yourself.” I linked the Zeigarnik effect and The Summer Book, both references that ended up in the final post. I also had a third reference from To the Lighthouse that didn’t make it to the final draft.

Obsidian graph view of connected notes

When sharing becomes the creative work is another Substack post that sprouted in my digital garden.

When sharing becomes the creative work

This started with the note “performing documentation taints the intrinsic experience of making.” If you check out the note you can see some of my earlier thoughts around the topic.

I like to leave the garden note as is and draft posts for publishing separately, either in Notion or directly in Substack. This way I can labor over the draft without accidentally publishing a half-formed version of it. I also enjoy seeing the beginnings of an idea through the garden note.

Do you have a digital garden? Share about it in the comments! And if you have any questions or struggles related to digital gardening, ask away—I’d love to answer more in a follow up post.

Some future SEE YOU announcements:

🌱 I have an interview with Kening Zhu slated for next week, then my 7 Things May update sometime the first week of June. After that, I will be offline at a writing residency in North Carolina for two weeks! SEE YOU will resume again June 26.

🌱 For my lovely paid subscribers: I’m planning on hosting Quietly Public coworking sessions for you this summer! You can come work on your website, your digital garden, or art/writing that will eventually make its way out in the public. These will be for 90 minutes every other Wednesday at 2 PM EST. We’ll start July 1 :)