This is a companion piece to What a digital garden is — and why I'm building one.. If you haven't read that yet, start there — it explains what a digital garden is and why the format matters. This article goes deeper into where the idea came from.
Where Did This Idea Even Come From?
When I first heard the term "digital garden," I assumed it was some recent internet trend — a new label slapped on an old idea by people who spend too much time on Twitter. But when I actually dug into the history, I was surprised by how deep the roots go.
The earliest ancestor of the digital garden isn't even digital. In 1945, an engineer named Vannevar Bush wrote an essay called "As We May Think" in The Atlantic. In it, he imagined a device called the Memex — a personal machine that could store all of your books, records, and ideas, and let you create trails of association between them. You'd link one idea to another, building personal pathways through knowledge. Sound familiar?
Bush was describing a digital garden before computers as we know them even existed.
The Hypertext Dream (1960s–1980s)
Bush's idea didn't stay buried in a magazine. In the 1960s, a philosopher and technologist named Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext" — text that links to other text, breaking free from the linear structure of printed pages. Nelson envisioned a system called Xanadu: a global network of interconnected documents where every idea could link to every other idea, and nothing would ever be deleted.
Xanadu was never fully built. But the concept of hypertext became the intellectual backbone of everything that followed — including the World Wide Web.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed the web itself, and by 1991 it was live. His original vision was remarkably garden-like: a decentralised space where anyone could create pages, link them freely, and build webs of knowledge. There was no feed. No algorithm. No timeline. Just pages linking to pages.
The early web was a garden. We just didn't call it that yet.
Wikis and the First True Gardens (1995–2005)
Fast forward to 1995. Ward Cunningham created the first ever wiki — a website anyone could edit, where pages linked freely to one another. It was non-linear, collaborative, and built around the idea that knowledge is interconnected, not hierarchical. Wikipedia eventually became the most famous wiki, but the original spirit was much more personal and experimental.
Around the same time, in 1998, Mark Bernstein published an essay called "Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas" — one of the earliest pieces to explicitly use the garden metaphor for organising information online. Bernstein argued that the best hypertext spaces weren't rigid hierarchies or chaotic tangles, but something in between: gardens with paths you could wander, but that still had intentional structure.
This was the first time someone articulated what many early web creators were already doing intuitively — building personal spaces that were linked, curated, and alive.
The Stream Takes Over (2005–2015)
Then came the blog era and, shortly after, social media.
Blogs introduced chronological publishing — newest post first, everything stamped with a date. Social media took that further with algorithmic feeds optimised for engagement, not understanding. The internet shifted from a space you explored to a stream you consumed.
The garden metaphor quietly disappeared. The web became about performance — publishing polished pieces on a schedule, competing for attention in an endless scroll. Personal websites declined. Platforms rose. The idea that the internet could be a thinking space got buried under the pressure to be a broadcasting space.
For about a decade, the stream dominated. And most people forgot there had ever been an alternative.
The Garden Resurfaces (2015–2020)
Then, in 2015, a writer and technologist named Mike Caulfield gave a talk called "The Garden and the Stream." This is the essay that really crystallised things for me. Caulfield argued that the internet had become dominated by the stream — the endless, chronological feed of social media and blogs. But there was another, older tradition: the garden. A space where ideas are arranged spatially, linked contextually, and tended over time. Not a performance. Not a broadcast. A place to think.
That talk reignited something. Over the next few years, a small but growing group of developers, writers, and thinkers started building their own digital gardens — personal websites that rejected the stream format in favour of something slower, richer, and more honest.
In 2018, Joel Hooks wrote "My blog is a digital garden, not a blog" — a short, punchy piece that gave a lot of people permission to rethink what their personal website could be. Around the same time, Tom Critchlow started publishing his wiki — a collection of evolving notes on strategy, media, and independent consulting that demonstrated the garden format in professional practice.
By 2020, the movement had exploded. Maggie Appleton published her landmark essay "A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden," which codified the principles: topological rather than chronological, continuous growth rather than fixed publishing, and the use of growth stages — 🌱 seedlings, 🌿 budding, and 🌳 evergreen — to signal how developed an idea is.
Andy Matuschak opened his working notes to the public — a raw, interconnected web of research thinking that became one of the most referenced examples of the format. Gwern Branwen maintained gwern.net, a meticulously researched and continuously updated collection of long-form essays that demonstrated how deep the format could go.
People were sharing half-formed notes, linking ideas across disciplines, and embracing the radical idea that you don't have to be done to be public. Tools like Obsidian, Roam Research, and Notion made the technical barrier lower than ever.
A Timeline
- 1945 — Vannevar Bush publishes "As We May Think," imagining the Memex
- 1960s — Ted Nelson coins "hypertext" and envisions Project Xanadu
- 1989 — Tim Berners-Lee proposes the World Wide Web
- 1995 — Ward Cunningham launches the first wiki (WikiWikiWeb)
- 1998 — Mark Bernstein publishes "Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas"
- 2005–2015 — Blogs and social media dominate; the stream era
- 2015 — Mike Caulfield's "The Garden and the Stream" reignites the garden metaphor
- 2018 — Joel Hooks and Tom Critchlow popularise the term in practice
- 2020 — Maggie Appleton codifies the ethos; the movement goes mainstream
- Today — Digital gardens are thriving.
What This History Tells Us
What I find most compelling about this timeline is that the digital garden isn't a reaction to social media. It predates it. It's a return to something the internet was always meant to be — a space for connecting ideas, not competing for attention.
The web was born as a garden. It became a stream. And now, slowly, people are planting gardens again.
We just forgot that for a while. But the roots were always there.
If you want to understand the concept itself and why I decided to build my own: What a digital garden is — and why I'm building one.
And if you want to see the gardens that inspired me most: Digital Gardens That Inspired Me.
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