We should all cultivate a digital garden A mindful way to gather, connect, nurture, and blossom your digital thoughts, without getting your hands dirty with soil

Looking to start a new summer hobby but gardening isn't your thing? Growing a digital garden might be the perfect solution to stay productive without killing your mom’s basil. Social media users seem to have gone crazy for this new trend which, unlike many others, turns out to be a useful, smart, and strategic practice for living both online and offline more consciously, reconnecting interests, and fighting the fragmentation of attention and curiosity that often happens on social networks.

What exactly is a digital garden?

It looks just like a real garden. Each flower or plant represents your interests and goals, and instead of roots, there are hyperlinks. Today, doomscrolling (the habit of endlessly scrolling through content, often stumbling upon bad news) has led to a decline in memory quality and a difficulty in consciously retrieving saved content, also due to algorithmic influence. How often do you forget the video you saw two seconds before the next one? Do you struggle to find the things you liked and feel lost in your saved content? As TikTok creator Sara Delrusso explains: "A digital garden is a way to keep scrolling but intentionally. It's about taking notes on things that interest you, fixing the idea instead of letting it slip away. Basically: you stop, pick up a thought, and nurture it." Through this practice, you might discover a lot about yourself: a photo, an old saved video, and an article you read today might suddenly have something in common, and that thing is you. Sara says something powerful before showing her digital garden: "Thanks to it, you're no longer just a passive spectator, but the author of your own mind."

How to grow a digital garden?

Artist and content creator Anna Howard was one of the first to talk about the trend. She asked herself how to become more interesting, then answered: "To be interesting, you have to be interested." In a hybrid ecosystem full of endless possibilities and constant media shifts, it’s hard to maintain steady pillars when it comes to interests, hobbies, passions, and personal taste. That’s why creating visual categories and organizing your small worlds into them can help you better manage your agenda—and your brain. First step? Download a creative digital archiving app or tool like Notion (an all-in-one workspace), or Obsidian, a highly customizable tool thanks to thousands of plugins and themes. These let you tailor the platform to your workflow and thinking style, making information management more intuitive and effective. In your digital garden, you can add categories and assign a flower or plant to each one. You can even create multiple gardens for different areas.

Digital garden categories

Library/Personal reading

Here you can grow your ideas on what you’ve read or learned. Think detailed book reviews, film analyses that stuck with you, or quotes and notes worth remembering and linking to other ideas.

Stream of consciousness

A place where your mind flows freely, without pressure for immediate or structured answers. Here you can write your ideas, questions that remain unanswered, and raw thoughts.

Memory lane

A place to stroll through your memories, maybe connecting them to current reflections or future plans. A kind of secret journal you never wrote, where you store your past and key moments.

Art and culture in the broadest sense

Jot down takeaways from exhibitions you’ve visited, concepts from artworks, thoughts on cultural events, or more structured reflections on society and politics. This is your notebook for interpreting and commenting on the world.

Personal creations

Give space to your own output. This might be personal essays, fragments of ideas, thoughts, photos, drawings. They are the “glitches” of your mind, seeds worth planting even if they don’t lead anywhere just yet.

Unlearning

A space to question and “unlearn” concepts or ideas you may have internalized over time and now feel the need to challenge. This may relate to political, social, cultural, or personal themes.

Inner child’s playground

Here, creativity and imagination take the lead. It’s where you connect with your inner child: your playful, spontaneous self. You might write about what makes you happy, do creative exercises, or build storylines for board or online games.

The digital garden embraces lightness

There are truly endless categories you can create, just like our Pinterest moodboards. But remember, a digital garden is not a school assignment: it doesn’t require consistency or perfection. "Take life with lightness, because lightness isn’t superficiality, but gliding over things from above, not carrying stones in your heart,” wrote Calvino in his American Lessons. And lightness is exactly the key to cultivating your digital garden, watering it with your essence. A kind of Ariadne’s thread that helps you move toward the future while holding onto the past and present, making your online experience more organized and, perhaps, even preserving your mental health.