About The Garden

Early in May 2021, I ran across the term “Digital Garden”, best elucidated in an article by Maggie Appleton entitled A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden. I shared this with Pica, and we were enthralled. A key thread in this article develops an idea shared by Mike Caufield that our time on the internet is dominated by monitoring highly time-bound streams of information rather than exploring a garden — the web as an always-rearranging network. Or as Amy Hoy pointed out, around 2001 blogging became a simple matter of plugging text into templates, thanks to the release of the software Movable Type. And from that point on the web became a chronostream, rather than a possible alternative path of the web turning into a fractal network of wikis.

We followed suit and in 2003 we launched a joint blog, Feathers of Hope. (Not surprisingly, the first platform we used for it was Movable Type). Pica later on in 2007 started a bird sketching blog, Bird by Bird. As happened to many other bloggers, our efforts petered out, as our attentions got diverted into the pull of social media.

But perhaps our difficulty was with blogging inherently being a chronostream. What if we think about our website being a garden, tidy in bits but mostly ragged and untrimmed, and plant it our accordingly? So herein we will share ideas, images, and words.

Posted by 30 May 2021  —  Last modified 30 May 2021  —  Design Arts