Being an avid reader of Maggie Appleton’s work, I discovered the concept of the Digital Garden thanks to her essay on the matter: https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
The Garden 🪴
The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.
Although many facets of the concept resonate with my own vision of the web, personal, inter-personal, local and low-tech, I was not 100% aligned with the gardening analogy. Growing up in the countryside near woods, I found my connection to nature in dense forests rather than in tidy gardens.
The Grove 🏕️
This is why I’m calling this online space agrove. I hope that it will help me to embrace the organic, messy ways in which thoughts, ideas and knowledge grow over time, and sometimes decay, just like trees in the woods.
The Campfire 🔥
Tom Crichtlow, a precursor of the digital garden ethos, actually built a much larger analogy around it, encompassing streams (e.g. twitter/X), and more interestingly, campfires:
While gardens present the ideas of an individual, campfires are conversational spaces to exchange ideas that aren’t yet fully formed.
https://tomcritchlow.com/2018/10/10/of-gardens-and-wikis/
I quite enjoy extended metaphores (or métaphores filées in French, for threaded 🪡), and it strikes me as interesting that the most mature ideas of this grove might become logs 🪵: neatly formatted stacks of thoughts, ready to use in a campfire to spark more conversation with friends, peers or strangers passing by.
🤖 All images generated using Midjourney v6 with variations of this prompt: Concept sketch of a grove with someone sitting and thinking, white background