Mark Bernstein's 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens appears to be the first recorded mention of the term.

Unplanned hypertext sprawl is wilderness: complex and interesting, but uninviting. Interesting things await us in the thickets, but we may be reluctant to plough through the brush, subject to thorns and mosquitoes

In April of 2007 when Tweets first started ringing through the internet airwaves, Rory Sutherland (oddly, the vice president of Ogilvy Group) used the term "digital gardening", but defined it as "faffing about syncing things, defragging - like pruning for young people"

At the 2015 Digital Learning Research Network, Mike Caufield delivered a keynote on The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral. It later becomes a hefty essay that lays the foundations for our current understanding of the term. If anyone should be considered the original source of digital gardening, it's Caufield.

streams only surface the Zetigeisty ideas of the last 24 hours. They are not designed to accumulate knowledge, connect disparate information, or mature over time.

The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.

The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.

Tom Critchlow's 2018 article Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens was one of the main kick-off points. Tom read Caufield's essay and began speculating on alternative metaphors to frame the way we consume and produce information.

Tom piece was shortly followed by Joel Hooks' My blog is a digital garden, not a blog in early 2019.

Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages... they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a web page.

Gardens don't consider publication dates the most important detail of a piece of writing. Dates might be included on posts, but they aren't the structural basis of how you navigate around the garden. Posts are connected to other by posts through related themes, topics, and shared context.

One of the best ways to do this is through Bi-Directional Links – links that make both the destination page and the source page visible to the reader.

Gardens are never finished, they're constantly growing, evolving, and changing. Just like a real soil, carrot, and cabbage garden.

In garden-land, that process of researching and refining happens on the open internet. You post ideas while they're still "seedlings,” and tend them regularly until they're fully grown, respectable opinions.

It gives readers an insight into your writing and thinking process.

gardens make their imperfection known to readers.

it's both intimate and public, weird and welcoming. It's less performative than a blog, but more intentional and thoughtful than a Twitter feed.

Digital gardens should be just as unique and particular as their vegetative counterparts. The point of a garden is that it's a personal playspace. You organise the garden around the ideas and mediums that match your way of thinking, rather than off someone else's standardised template.

Gardens offer us the ability to present ourselves in forms that aren't cookie cutter profiles. They're the higher-fidelity version, complete with quirks, contradictions, and complexity.

Gardening is about claiming a small patch of the web for yourself, one you fully own and control.

At the moment our gardens are rather solo affairs. We haven't figure out how to make them multi-player. But there's an enthusiastic community of developers and designers trying to fix that.