There’s a patch of earth behind my house that I’ve been neglecting for three years. Last weekend, I finally went out with a trowel and a pair of gloves and started pulling weeds. What I found underneath was surprising: the soil was still alive. Worms, roots, the faint green whisper of something that had been waiting patiently for attention.

I’ve been thinking about that patch of earth a lot lately, because it reminds me of something we used to do on the internet — something we’ve mostly stopped doing.

The Garden, Not the Feed

Once upon a time, the internet was full of gardens. Personal websites with hand-coded HTML. Weblogs with blogrolls linking to other weblogs. Wikis that grew organically, page by page, like vines finding their way up a trellis. These spaces weren’t optimized for engagement. They weren’t designed to go viral. They were tended.

The concept of “digital gardening” has been making a quiet comeback, and I think it’s because we’re exhausted. We’re exhausted by the feed — the endless scroll, the algorithmically-curated firehose of content that demands we consume and react and move on. A garden asks something different of you. It asks you to slow down. To plant something and come back next week to see how it’s growing.

What Makes a Garden?

Maggie Appleton, who’s become one of the movement’s most articulate voices, describes digital gardens as “a different way of thinking about knowledge on the web.” The key characteristics:

• Growth over decay. A garden post isn’t finished — it’s alive. You update it. You prune it. You let some parts grow wild.
• Context-dependent. Gardens acknowledge that a visitor arriving in spring sees something different than one arriving in fall. The content changes with the seasons of your understanding.
• Imperfect by design. A garden has rough edges. That’s the point. A half-finished thought, clearly labeled as such, is more honest than a polished article that pretends to certainty.
• Interconnected. Plants in a garden don’t grow in isolation. They share soil, shade, water. Garden pages link to each other — not for SEO, but because ideas are rhizomatic.

My Own Overgrown Plot

This website is, in its own small way, an attempt at digital gardening. Not in the strictest sense — I don’t have a proper wiki with bidirectional links and evolving notes (yet). But the impulse is here: to write things that I might come back to, to let ideas breathe and change, to resist the pressure of the content calendar.

There’s something deeply countercultural about this. The entire architecture of the modern web is designed to make you produce, not tend. Post daily. Grow your audience. Optimize your funnel. The language of growth hacking has infected everything, and we’ve forgotten that some things grow better when you stop measuring them.

The Patience of Perennials

In my actual garden — the one with dirt under my fingernails — I’ve been learning about perennials. These are the plants that come back year after year. They don’t produce the biggest blooms or the fastest growth. But they’re reliable. They establish deep roots. They survive the winter.

I think the best writing on the internet works the same way. The posts that stay with you aren’t usually the hot takes or the breaking news. They’re the essays someone wrote in 2014 that you found through a chain of links, that felt like they were written just for you, that you bookmarked and returned to and eventually internalized.

Those are perennials. And they can only grow in gardens.

How to Start Your Own

You don’t need special tools. You don’t need a static site generator or a custom CMS or a fancy wiki platform (though they help). You need:

1. A space you control. Not a social media profile. Not a Medium publication. Something with your name on it and your hands on the keyboard.
2. A willingness to be unfinished. Publish the draft. Label it “growing” or “seedling” or “perennial.” Let people see the process.
3. The discipline to return. A garden isn’t a one-time project. It’s a practice. Go back to old posts and update them. Add new connections. Let your past self have a conversation with your present self.
4. Links, not likes. When you reference an idea, link to it. When you’re inspired by someone, point your readers toward them. The currency of a garden is connection, not validation.

The Soil Is Still Alive

I went back to my garden patch this morning. The weeds I pulled last weekend are already starting to come back — of course they are. That’s what weeds do. But underneath, the soil is darker now, looser, breathing. I planted some seeds. I don’t know if they’ll take.

That’s the thing about gardens. You don’t control them. You participate in them. You show up, you do the work, and you trust that something will grow.

The internet could use more of that spirit. Less performance, more cultivation. Less content, more care. The soil is still alive out there, underneath all the concrete of the attention economy. You just have to be willing to get your hands dirty.