A digital garden is a public, evolving collection of interconnected notes — published as you think, not as a finished work.
Why it matters
Coined by Mike Caulfield around 2015 and popularised by writers like Maggie Appleton and Andy Matuschak, the digital garden is an alternative to the blog. Where a blog post is finished and dated, a garden note is provisional and updated. Visitors graze, not consume linearly.
Digital gardens emphasise **non-linear navigation** (links between notes, not chronology) and **growth over time** (notes are tended like plants). They've become the dominant publishing format for technical writers and researchers who want to share ideas-in-progress.
How Pith relates
Pith is private by default — the auto-built wiki is yours, not a public garden. But Pith pages can be shared with time-bounded signed URLs, which is closer to a 'curated branch of a garden' than a blog post. For a fully public garden, Obsidian Publish or Quartz are better fits.
See also
Last reviewed: 10 May 2026 · Licensed CC BY 4.0 · cite freely with attribution to Pith.