Seeds of a Digital Garden

2025-04-25 · About 9 minutes long

2022-12-03 · Isaac Clayton · 87 minutes spent

One problem I often run into when I start writing is that I have either too few ideas or too many. To put an idea on a page, we have to isolate it, find its form, and pin it down. Unfortunately, ideas are slippery things: it is hard to straighten a slippery tangle of thoughts into a single, coherent thread. We want to have clear ideas to write about, because clear ideas lead to clear writing.

A garden in the wilderness

To that end, suppose our mind is a little patch of wilderness in which wild ideas take root. Though many interesting ideas may find fertile ground, they will be choked out unless tended to. If our goal is to consistently harvest the best ideas to write about, we have to gradually cultivate this wilderness until it resembles something of a garden. Like a gardener, we can’t wrestle this tangle of weeds and ideas with bare hands alone: we need gloves and tools to direct and magnify our efforts.

So in this essay, I hope to outline some techniques we can use and habits we can build to tend to our digital garden.

Squaring off a plot

A digital garden is a digital space we use to cultivate ideas. Like any good gardener, before we plant any seeds, we must first plot out our garden and prepare the soil for planting. It really doesn’t matter where you start your digital garden, because unlike physical gardens, digital gardens are relatively easy to move around and replant elsewhere. So hide the clutter on your desktop, open up a fresh browser pane, create a new document—text file, Google doc, Notion block, or otherwise—and start plotting out your garden.

Things will be a little messy at first, but we’re dealing with plants and dirt, not permanent stone. It’s okay to make mistakes. The first thing you’re going to want to do, though, is to make your digital garden easily accessible. Don’t leave it floating in cyber-space, lay down a little path between your home (screen) and your (digital) garden. Whether that be a bookmark in your browser or alias on your desktop is up to you, just make sure you keep the path visible and well-groomed, lest it becomes overgrown with wayward bits.

Questions are seeds for ideas

If our goal is to harvest ideas, we need some sort of seeds from which ideas spring. What better seed exists than those of Questions?

This first document you’ve created (the first of many) will be a little nursery for the seeds you encounter while jungling through The Internet. This is where your Questions go.

When creating a new page in my digital garden, I like to start with a title, a date, and a short description of how the document is organized, roughly. While this description acts as loose schema now, over time the organization of the document will become entrenched as we build habits respecting it.

Your Questions document doesn’t have to be anything fancy… at first. It could start as a list of questions, and the date they were asked on, for instance. (Recording dates is important: it is better to have a date and not need it than to need a date and not have it.)

How to find questions is, well, another question, of course. (Maybe you could add that to your Questions page!) While browsing the interwebs, just keep your Questions page open in the background: when a moment of inspiration strikes, you now have a place to reify that seed of thought: write it down.

Nursing seeds into outlines

Questions are important, but alone they are just seeds. We need to plant them, water them, give them plenty of sun, and a little space to grow. Enter, the humble Outline.

An outline is nothing fancy. It is a supple collection of phrases, arranged in hierarchy, tracing out the hills and valleys of a particular thread of thought. Find your most interesting questions (perhaps marking them with a star): these are seeds you are ready to plant.

For each ready seed, you can sketch an outline. When and where you sketch an outline are up to you. You could set a daily goal, do it as you come across new ideas, directly in-line, or on a new page. As you sketch more outlines, you will get better at organizing them.

From nursery to garden proper

Once an outline gets too large to conveniently exist in line, it is definitely time to move it to another page. So create a new document, and copy the question and outline there. You are now free to remove the outline from your Questions document, but be sure to link to the new page!

Figuring out how to make a strong link is important. If your digital garden exists on the web, you are lucky that hyperlinks exist. If you have used a text file, you might be experiencing some growing pains. These pains are natural, and indeed… oddly desirable. Look to figure out how to make links work: you could host your text file on the web, switch to a tool like Obsidian, use a fancier text editor like Emacs (with the right plugins), or roll something of a home-grown solution, a program of your own. (A word of warning: you are building a digital garden, not something that builds digital gardens. Forsake abstraction: do not lose sight of your original goal.)

Once you have plotted out a Questions page and a manner to link to your steadily-growing outlines, remember that a garden requires care and weeding. Some outlines will grow blazingly fast, and start to deviate from the original question they were designed to answer. You must weed and prune your outlines.

Pruning and replanting

Some growths within an outline are interesting in their own right. A weed is only a plant that is growing in the wrong place: that plant might have a home elsewhere in your garden. Thoroughly weed and prune your outline, keeping it healthy. Move interesting seeds to their own plot; cast any wicked tangents into the composting bin. It is important to keep a tidy garden: we are trying to tame the wild growth rather than letting it grow unbounded.

Our sprouting outlines are cute and fun to care for, but hold no weight as a productive plant that will bear fruit. Our ideas have not yet taken root. We must allow young ideas to settle more permanently in the soil of our minds. Like a plant spreading its leaves and taking root, we must turn our outline into weightier paragraphs.

From outline to essay

Once pruned, supported, and refined, an outline should hold a single, easy-to-follow thread of thought that marks the shape of a fully-grown plant. The thread of an outline should fully address the question at hand. Once ready, grow an outline into paragraphs by translating one point at a time, each point mapping to a paragraph. Although the growth of paragraphs may be a little wild and uncultivated, it is best to let them grow out fully, lest they wither because of premature pruning.

Once an idea has taken root and sprouted into a wild mass of greenery, it is time to prune and refine our plant until we coax out the fruit of our labors. Reading the unfurled outline top to bottom, we can discover inconsistencies, dead branches, unneeded explanation, and lopsided details. With a shear in hand, trim out these wayward paragraphs. Though it is hard to remove writing, do it for the good of the idea as a whole.

Seeds of new ideas, the fruit of your labor

At this stage you should have a healthy plant growing firmly in a corner of your garden. The fruit of your labors is a complete answer to the question you originally posed, which hopefully contains many seeds for future questions. It may be tempting to leave this answer as-is, but we are far from done. A good gardener knows it is best to continue to care for even fully-grown plants.

Revisit old ideas from time to time. Let them grow out a little more, then prune and refine them. Gradual editing and improvement is key to caring for healthy plants. Lay down paths within your garden, linking ideas together. Add signs and labels to make it harder to get lost. Add benches as points to rest and admire. Every garden is a little different, from backyard to botanical; work on your garden daily, and make it your own.

Tending to a growing garden

Although questions are effective seeds, they are far from the only seeds that exist. As part of the questions you ask yourself, ask questions as to how you can improve your garden. Building a garden is more than just planting seeds: it requires building fences, laying paths, careful weeding, and so on. You will sweat a little.

To extend your garden, you could start recording the things you read alongside the questions that arise. You could start keeping a journal to record what happens each day. You could embark on larger projects, linking together a series of ideas to landscape a larger vista. Don’t limit yourselves to words alone. Ideas come in far more shapes than lines of symbols on a page. Figure out how to draw. How to link sequences of drawings together. How to create little interactive worlds that illustrate ideas better than any words or pictures could. This may be hard; the tools you might need might not exist yet. Don’t let that stop you.