# Digital gardens and visual essays · Explaining with interaction [Maggie Appleton](https://maggieappleton.com) describes herself on her [about page](https://maggieappleton.com/about) as “Designer, anthropologist, and mediocre developer,” working “at the intersection of design, anthropology, and web development” under “the umbrellas of design engineering, product design, and visual interface design.” The career runs from Egghead (illustrator, art director, UX designer, with a “robust process for visualising complex programming concepts through graphic design, metaphors, and cultural symbols”), through Head of Design at HASH, founding product designer at Elicit (“a research tool that uses language models to speed up the systematic review process”), and Lead Design Engineer at Normally, to Staff Research Engineer at GitHub Next since October 2025. In a 2026 talk: “I’m actually a designer. Or I was, back when that was still a separate thing to engineering.” ### The garden and the stream Her site is a **digital garden** (A digital garden is a collection of imperfect notes, essays, and ideas growing slowly over time.), and her 2020 essay [A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden](https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history) defines it: “A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date,” linked by association, published half-finished, “less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing.” The history runs from Mark Bernstein’s 1998 Hypertext Gardens, “the first recorded mention of the term,” to Mike Caulfield’s 2015 The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral, “the original source of digital gardening.” The stream is the feed, “the Zeitgeisty ideas of the last 24 hours,” and is “not designed to accumulate knowledge, connect disparate information, or mature over time.” “The garden is our counterbalance,” it is “not about specific tools,” and “No one owns The Official Definition.” ### Six patterns of gardening Instead of a definition she offers six patterns. Topography over timelines: “Many entry points but no prescribed pathways.” Continuous growth: “You post ideas while they’re still ‘seedlings,’ and tend them regularly until they’re fully grown, respectable opinions.” Imperfection and **learning in public** (Learn in Public; the practice of sharing what you learn as you're learning it, not a decade later once you're an 'expert.'), which “requires that we make the status of our notes clear to readers.” Playful, personal, and experimental, built in “the native languages of the web,” HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Intercropping: podcasts, videos, diagrams, illustrations, interactive animations, papers, tweets, sketches, and code snippets all in one garden. Independent ownership: “claiming a small patch of the web for yourself,” with web-native formats and flat markdown backups. She names the cost: experimentation “requires knowing a non-trivial amount of HTML, CSS, and JS,” and no-code tools are “pre-fab houses instead of raw building materials.” Source The six patterns are headings in A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden (June 2020): Topography over Timelines; Continuous Growth; Imperfection & Learning in Public; Playful, Personal, and Experimental; Intercropping & Content Diversity; Independent Ownership. ### A garden that practises it Her own site calls itself “a collection of imperfect notes, essays, and ideas growing slowly over time” and sorts growth by kind: Essays (“Opinionated, long-form narrative writing with an agenda”), Notes (“Loose notes on things I don’t entirely understand yet”), Patterns, Smidgeons, Talks, Podcasts, a Library and an Antilibrary of “Books I like the idea of having read,” plus Now, About, and Colophon. Every post carries a growth stage (“They start as seedlings, grow into buddings, and finally end up as evergreens”) and the dates it was planted and last tended; some open with an assumed audience “to make explicit who I’m writing for.” Status, provenance, and audience on every idea: the ethos made visible. The [colophon](https://maggieappleton.com/colophon): “I designed and built this site myself. Everything is open source and published on GitHub.” Astro “does most of the heavy lifting,” every note is MDX, Vercel hosts it, “Animations are mostly CSS, with some more complex ones done in Motion,” and earlier versions on Gatsby and Next.js are “neither of which I would recommend.” Headings are Canela Display, body Canela Text, Lato for sans-serif, on a fluid scale from Utopia; the CMS is “just a bunch of flat files and folders,” and ideas “start and marinate in my Tana.” Why build rather than rent: working in the native medium of the web “gives me fine-grained control,” and “Text isn’t the only way to represent ideas.” ### Two essays that stage an argument [The Dark Forest and Generative AI](https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest) (December 31, 2022) starts from Yancey Strickler’s **dark forest theory of the web** (The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online.): public spaces “overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait,” so humans hide in “invite-only Slack channels, Discord groups, email newsletters, small-scale blogs, and digital gardens.” Language models “are poised to flood the web with generic, generated content,” so “Our new challenge as little snowflake humans will be to prove we aren’t language models.” Five ways to pass follow: triangulate objective reality (models “cannot go outside and touch grass”); be original, critical, and sophisticated (model text “sounds like a B+ college essay”); develop language quirks, dialects, memes, and jargon (Saussure’s la parole); institutional verification, “fraught with problems”; and showing up in meatspace, which “still feels like a loss.” [A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment](https://maggieappleton.com/ai-enlightenment) (August 5, 2025) starts from a New York Times op-ed by Professor David A. Bell: chatbots undermine “active intellectual engagement, sceptical inquiry, and challenging received wisdom,” and ChatGPT “has never responded: ‘That’s the wrong question.’” It becomes a design argument: a less sycophantic character “is well within the range of what we can prompt,” but “Putting the onus on the user sidesteps the problem,” and the problem is partly “the generic interface of the helpful chatbot assistant,” an “all-in-one text box” for which “the fawning, deferential assistant personality is the lowest common denominator.” She predicts specialist areas “will eventually get their own dedicated interfaces to AI”; her first pass is a toggle between “give me the gist” and “help me rigorously think about this.” The postscript: “AI wrote none of the words in this piece, but Harsh Claude helped critique it during the draft stages.” Both essays open with an assumed audience; the Treatise names “People building software with language models who want to consider the implications of their design choices.” What to take from her: a personal site can be an instrument rather than a brochure. Put a status on what you publish so you can publish early. Link by association, not by date. Build in the medium you are writing about. And when you argue, stage it: order the sections, draw the concepts, name who they are for, which is what a good interface does with a task. The next section reads the patterns catalogue, the part of her garden most useful to a design engineer.