The garden is the web as topology. Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships. (The Garden and the Stream)
The concept comes from Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens, written during the early, experimental phase of the web. Bernstein described gardens as spaces that lie between farmland and wilderness, organized but not rigidly structured, places where users can explore and wade into the unknown. A more modern meaning crystallized later when Mike Caulfield delivered a keynote called The Garden and the Stream. His core argument was that the internet had been taken over by “streams”, chronological feeds like Twitter and Instagram, and that gardens offered a different relationship with information: one that accumulates and deepens over time rather than rushing past you.
I was still not entirely sure, until I came up with the idea of using Obsidian, an app I was already using for my 8+ years of journaling and all my ideas for scripts, projects, and art. The plan was to start posting things without too much overthinking or extensive design, and see what happened.
I came across Quartz, a framework that allowed me to convert markdown notes into a flat HTML site I could host for free on GitHub Pages. But more than the implementation, what deeply resonated was this idea from Jacky Zhao, the creator of Quartz:
The ideal tool for thought for me would embrace the messiness of my mind, and organically help insights emerge from chaos instead of forcing an artificial order.
And I didn’t need anything else. That was it. I didn’t want to get caught up in whether this is a blog, a portfolio, or a personal site. I wanted all of it. And yeah, I know people tend to tell me I want too much from life, but we’re complex individuals, and mi cerebro no funciona para el linear thinking todo el tiempo. It’s time to embrace the rich complexity.
I wanted a tool that didn’t get me caught up in design and implementation details, but still had enough complexity to keep things fun.