Disclaimer on Gardening

I have never gardened in my life. But I have always gardened digitally.

I love paper. I'm always writing in a notebook. But I've also spent a lot of time designing my own system of keeping electronic notes. The notes are one part of a highly-organized and bespoke (read: idiosyncratic) system of hypermedia and software that functions as my extended memory. The public part of this system is the garden, available on my website.

Perhaps I should not call it a garden, because I have not earned the metaphor. "Wiki" is an alternative, but brings with it rigid notions about the form and process. Since I've heard of relatively few people talking about digital gardens, the term functions to impede the visitor's preconceptions and leave them open to the reception of a new form.

Digital gardening isn't about the end product, but the process. (I assume that this is also the case with real gardening for many hobbyists.) The term "wiki" lacks an obvious single verb to describe the whole process. Wikifying? You see the problem. It is easier to simply call it gardening. Plus, it gives me a convenient term to help articulate the activity of leisurely maintenance of virtual spaces and tinkering with personal software that I have been doing as long as I can remember.

I hope that the garden metaphor does not disappoint when you discover there are no leaves and flowers, no watering can or bees buzzing around. While I could artifically insert the sounds of the wind and insects and the imagery of vegetation through the HTML of this website, it would implicitly undermine the strength of the metaphor. I believe this really is already a garden in the ways that matter: it is deliberate, it is personal, it is toil, it is growing, it is for you to look at and enjoy.

I hope that, one day, we can all join our digital gardens together in a kind of public internet park.