My Digital Garden
First planted August 2025 🪴
In its most fundamental definition, a digital garden is a collection of notes. As for me, I started a digital garden because I didn’t want what I learned to fade away. Instead, I wish to plant what I have learned, tend it, and let it grow. To have my own knowledge arboretum.
I have been a longtime analog notetakers. Be it in my diary, #planner, #bulletjournal, or recently my #commonplace book. Then I started to taking notes digitally on Evernote, Notion, to now in #Obsidian.
Of course as a digital lurker, when I first stumbled into the idea of a “digital garden,” to store my notes and learning, it resonated deeply. Plus i love gardening in real life too. 🪴
The concept of Digital Garden sounds accepting in a world where perfectionism is the standard. Maggie Appleton on A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden said:
"A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete – notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing."
It reminds me of how I always love learning but sharing things where I feel like I am not an expert seems daunting. But digital gardening are more forgiving. So I started to look back at how to do it, then I remembered I worked with Jekyll before. With a little bit of tinkering, coding, and forking on github from Max. and Mike’s guide on connecting it with Obsidian, ta-da here we are at my garden.
But the garden isn’t just about code. It’s about creating a different kind of relationship with the digital world. Unlike the fleeting, polished snapshots that dominate social media, a digital garden allows for ideas that are evolving, incomplete, or messy. Notes here can change, expand, or link to other ideas over time. They don’t need to be final to be worth sharing.
There’s also something liberating about building a space that doesn’t depend on algorithms. No likes, no feeds, no pressure to perform. Just a small plot of internet soil to tend in my own way, at my own pace.
For me, this garden is an experiment in curiosity and connection. It’s a place where I can weave together the different threads of my life—education, research interest, photography, crochet, coding, travel, and the simple act of noticing. Some notes will stay as fragments; others may grow into something more. That’s the point. Growth here doesn’t happen in a straight line, but in layers and connections.
This is why I started mine. To learn in public. To keep things alive. To cultivate a space where ideas can grow, however slowly, and to see what emerges when they do.
🌱 🌿 🪴🌲