“Gardens … lie between farmland and wilderness … The garden is farmland that delights the senses, designed for delight rather than commodity.” — Bernstein
The term “Knowledge Garden” evokes a sense of nurturing, growth, and interconnectedness. It’s a concept that has been gaining traction as a response to the increasingly corporatized and impersonal nature of the modern internet. This document, based on conversations with Spencer (Clint Amenick) and insights from the community, explores the philosophy and practice behind knowledge gardens.
A Return to a More Personal Web
At its core, a knowledge garden is a return to the spirit of the early internet—the “blogosphere” or “Web1”—where individuals curated their own digital spaces. It’s a conscious move away from what Cory Doctorow calls “enshitification,” where users of large platforms become the product. A knowledge garden is your own plot on the internet, a place for autonomous self-expression.
Popularized by figures like Maggie Appleton, the idea of a “digital garden” emphasizes curation, intentionality, and a more philosophical approach to sharing information online. A knowledge garden builds on this by marrying the personal, curated nature of a digital garden with the information density of a wiki.
Embracing Messy, Networked Thought
A knowledge garden is distinct from a rigid filing system. As Jacky Zhao, creator of Quartz, notes in his essay on Networked Thought, a garden is less like a neatly organized farm and more like a “mess of entangled growth.” This intentional embrace of a little chaos allows for serendipitous connections between ideas that might not otherwise meet.
This approach favors a rhizomatic structure over an arborescent one. Instead of a top-down, hierarchical tree of knowledge, a rhizome is a network that spreads horizontally, with new links forming organically. This mirrors the non-linear way we often think and allows for unexpected insights to emerge from the connections between notes.
Beyond Blogs: Co-creation and Curation
Unlike traditional blogs, which are often geared towards consumption, knowledge gardens are spaces for co-creation. They are living, breathing entities that are constantly evolving as your own knowledge grows and changes. The metaphor of a garden is central to this concept:
- Tending and Weeding: Just as a physical garden requires care, a knowledge garden needs to be tended. This involves organizing thoughts, refining ideas, and removing what is no longer relevant.
- Planting Seeds: New ideas are “planted” as notes or articles, which can then be nurtured and developed over time.
- Composting: Raw, unrefined thoughts can be “composted” – stored in a way that allows them to break down and enrich the soil of the garden for future ideas.
This process is therapeutic and refreshing, offering a space free from corporate agendas where personal expression can flourish.
The Practice of Gardening
Digital gardening is an active process of expression and sharing. The goal is less about performing intelligence and more about participating in a collective sensemaking process. As Richard Hamming famously said, someone who “works with the door open” is exposed to interruptions, but also to clues about what might be important.
Inspired by practitioners like Zhao, here are some common gardening practices:
- Link by Concept: Connect notes based on conceptual relationships, not just keywords. This helps reveal deeper connections.
- Simple Naming: Use clear, simple nouns or verbs for note titles to make linking more intuitive.
- Leverage Search: Use search as a starting point to jump into the network, then follow the links to explore associated ideas.
The Lifecycle of an Idea
Zhao also provides a useful framework for thinking about the flow of knowledge in a garden:
- Seeds: Low-friction inputs like bookmarks, highlights, and fleeting thoughts.
- Saplings: Developing ideas, written as individual notes. These are not yet forced into categories, allowing for cross-pollination between different domains.
- Fruits: Mature, derivative works like essays or projects that have grown from the interconnected saplings in the garden.
Local-First and Data Sovereignty
A key principle behind the knowledge garden is “local-first” software. This means that your data lives on your own devices, giving you full control and ownership. You can then choose to syndicate your content to various platforms without being locked into any single service. This approach mitigates the risks of platform deprecation, acquisition, or censorship.
This model gives you true sovereignty over your digital space. You have control over who you let into your garden and how your content is shared.
Tools of the Trade: Obsidian and Friends
Obsidian is a popular tool for building knowledge gardens. It’s a free, local-first note-taking application that allows you to create and link notes in a non-linear fashion. It’s built on plain text Markdown files, which makes your content portable and future-proof.
With Obsidian, you can:
- Create your own personal wiki or “second brain.”
- Visualize the connections between your notes as a graph.
- Use it for journaling, research, or any form of writing.
- Publish your garden as a website using tools like Quartz or Obsidian Publish.
The use of open protocols and decentralized storage solutions like Arweave can further enhance the permanence and resilience of a knowledge garden, ensuring that the knowledge can be preserved for future generations.
The Zettelkasten Method
The concept of a knowledge garden is also closely related to the Zettelkasten, or “note box,” method. This is a century-old analog note-taking system, famously used by sociologist Niklas Luhmann. It involves creating atomic notes on index cards and linking them together to form a web of knowledge. Tools like Obsidian make it trivially easy to implement a digital Zettelkasten, allowing you to see the emergent structure of your thoughts.
The Future: AI and Connected Knowledge
The integration of AI into knowledge gardens opens up exciting possibilities. An AI assistant could help you query your own knowledge base, find connections between ideas, and even co-create content with you. When a community shares a knowledge garden, the AI can be trained on the collective knowledge of that community, providing highly curated and context-aware insights.
By creating and tending to our own knowledge gardens, we can create a more thoughtful, personal, and resilient internet, leaving behind a rich legacy of “digital breadcrumbs” for those who come after us.
References
- Zhao, Jacky. “Networked Thought.”
- The Human Layer Podcast. “Hyperlocal Sovereignty: Building Antifragile Knowledge Commons.”