Digital Gardening Tools and Resources

This collection of apps, tools and articles is here to help you learn more about digital gardening. Ideally, it's here to help you start your own garden.

What is "digital gardening"?

A garden is something inbetween a personal blog and a wiki. It's a collection of evolving notes, essays, and ideas that aren't strictly organised by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory – posts are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined or complete - posts can be published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal "blogs" we're used to encountering on the web.

See the Theory, Philosophy, and Navel-gazing section for more on the 'what' of gardens.

Gardening Tools

Building a Public Garden

• Roam Research - A personal notes system for interconnected thought
  • See the following resources for converting your private garden in Roam to a public garden:
    • Roam Garden a service that does all the setup for you based on JSON export
    • Gatsby Theme Garden Gatsby theme that supports using Roam as a source
    • Roam-to-Garden Jekyll based converter for your Roam Data
• Obsidian - a Roam-like knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files. Also allows you to publish selections of your graph to the open web.
• TiddlyWiki - A no-code personal wiki system
  • Stroll a TiddlyWiki plugin with bi-directional links and other Roam-like features
  • TiddlyMap - a mind-map plugin that shows visualizations for TiddlyWiki.
• Gitbook
• React-Notion - allows you to publish a React-based website sources from your Notion notes - "Notion as a CMS"
• Gatsby Brain Theme - Roam-like bidirectional links in Gatsby.js
• Gatsby Andy Theme
• Gatsby Theme Garden - A set of tools to build a digital garden with Gatsby.js. Pull data from Roam Research or markdown.
• Simply Jekyll - A Jekyll theme with bidirectional links, sidenotes, and transclusion
• Digital Garden Jekyll Template - A simple, clean jekyll template with bi-directional links
• Jekyll-Bonsai - A modern jekyll theme for semantically inclined digital gardeners.
• Jekyll Garden - Clean Jekyll theme supoorting bidirectional links.
• Eleventy Garden - A minimal template with backlinks, built in Eleventy
• Foam - Roam-like personal note management and publishing system built inside VSCode
• Foamy NextJS - Basic Foam + NextJS with MDX starter for building a digital garden
• Dendron - A structured note taking tool that merges the freedom of Roam-like linking with the order hierarchical organization
• Hyperdraft - Turns plain markdown notes into a website as you write. Easy to setup and doesn't require builds or deploys.
• Neuron - Managing and publishing system for plain-text Zettelkasten-style notes.
• Innos Notes – Features include parallel pages, content blocks, and knowledge graph visualisations.
• Trilium Notes - A hierarchical note taking application with focus on building large personal knowledge bases.

Building a Private Garden

• Bangle.io - A simple, markdown-based notetaking app that runs locally on your machine.
• Org Roam - non-hierarchical note-taking with org-mode in emacs
• TheBrain - A tool for taking interconnected notes with an interactive graph.
• The Archive - A fast plain text Markdown note-taking app with Zettelkasten features like linking and tagging.

Extra Gardening Tools

• Webmentions - About the Webmentions system
  • Webmention.io - A service to add Webmentions to your Garden
• Hypothesis - A layer of social meta commentary
• mkdocs-newsletter - An add-on to the MKdocs platform that generates a newsletter logging which pages have changed

How-To's and Tutorials

• How to build a digital garden with TiddlyWiki by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
• Own Your Second Brain: Set Up org-roam on Your Own Machine by Ian Jones
• Building a Digital Garden by Tom Critchlow
• Webmentions - Joining the IndieWeb with Svelte by Shawn Wang
• How to plant a Garden a video walkthrough for converting your RoamResearch DB into a public garden by Vlad Sitalo
• Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks by Maggie Appleton

Theory, Philosophy, and Navel-Gazing

• The Garden and the Stream: A Techno pastoral by Mike Caulfield – the original source of the concept of Digital Gardening
• Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens by Tom Critchlow
• How the Blog Broke the Web by Amy Hoy
• My blog is a digital garden, not a blog by Joel Hooks
• You and your mind garden by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
• Digital Garden Terms of Service by Shawn Wang
• What is a digital garden? by Chris Biscardi
• The Garden and the Stream: An IndieWeb Pop-up Session
• The Swale: Weaving between Garden and Stream by Will Stedden
• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton

Common Ground: Zettelkasten, Knowledge Graphs, Wikis, and Related Concepts

• Zettelkasten: knowledge and info management
• The Zettelkasten Method by Abram Demski
• A web of wikis by Neil Mather
• Bliki tooling by Neil Mather
• Hack Your Life With A Private Wiki Notebook, Getting Things Done, And Other Systems by Bill Seitz
• As We May Think by Vannevar Bush (The Atlantic, 1945)

Digital Garden Directory

⭐️ = Featured; unique and exceptional examples

Other digital garden compilations:

• Nikita's compilation
• Richard Litt's compilation
• KasperZutterman's compilation
• Best-of Digital Gardens