A Brief History of the Digital Garden

Digital gardens are personal websites built as evolving, interlinked collections of unfinished notes rather than chronological blogs. Mark Bernstein's 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens appears to be the first recorded use of the term, while Rory Sutherland used it in 2007 to mean digital maintenance. Mike Caufield's 2015 essay The Garden and the Stream framed gardens as a counterbalance to time-bound streams of information, and Joel Hooks later promoted revising ideas in public. Amy Hoy argues that Moveable Type's launch around 2001 helped push blogs toward standardised, reverse-chronological layouts.