What's a Garden?

What's a Garden?

"Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin."

— Voltaire, Candide

I wander the pages. I rake the margins. I reach out a hand to feel the box layout of a delicate div. I see a misaligned figure, and I put it back in its place.

Zen of CSS

A digital garden is loaded metaphor. It evokes a "gardener" who spends their leisure time tending to their digital spaces by maintaining and updating personal websites, notes, projects, ....

In another sense, the "garden" itself is a public digital space where visitors can wander through a hypermedia graph without a specific goal or designated "correct" path. Visitors can relax and breathe deeply, because this is not a space that expects anything of you. The seeds in the garden are simply there so that others can watch them grow.

It is not a blog, portfolio, book, catalogue, or archive (though I do like those things). It is a celebration and appreciation of virtual space.

If anything, it is most similar to a wiki. Hypertext is central to my conception of the digital garden.

My garden is eclectic. You may find experiments, half-finished ideas, and poetry. You may find dead-ends and loops. You may find context or you may not. You may come back another day and find things have shifted, appeared, or disappeared.

Gardening is a process.

Disclaimer on gardening.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow...