Evergreen Notes & Digital Gardens

Andy Matuschak's evergreen notes, Maggie Appleton's digital gardens — publishing-flavoured PKM.

The "publish in public, evolve over time" branch of PKM. Less rigid than Zettelkasten, more disciplined than journaling. Pair with pkm-overview-methodologies and pkm-zettelkasten; for tools to publish a garden see pkm-publishing-digital-gardens-quartz; see also markdown, prod-knowledge-management-readwise.

Evergreen Notes (Andy Matuschak)

★ Notes should be evergreen. Written for yourself over time, revised — not replaced.
★ Concept-oriented. A note is about one concept, not "things I read on Tuesday."
★ Titles are claims. "Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented" — not "Notes."
Densely linked. Links beat tags; tags beat folders.
Atomic. One concept, one note.
Iterative. Don't try to write the perfect note in one sitting; expect to return.
See: notes.andymatuschak.org.

★ Public, in-progress, non-performative. Unlike a blog, posts aren't finished; they grow.
★ Bidirectional links visible to readers. The graph is the structure.
Stewarded, not curated. A garden has weeds, half-grown plants, mature trees. Performative perfection isn't the point.
Multiple growth stages: seedlings, budding, evergreen — Maggie Appleton's three-tier model.
See: maggieappleton.com/garden-history.

★ Quartz ★ — free OSS; static-site generator built specifically for Obsidian-shape notes; bidirectional links rendered; the 2024-26 default for "publish my Obsidian vault as a digital garden."
- https://github.com/jackyzha0/quartz
★ Logseq Publish — free; built-in static export; deploy to GitHub Pages.
Dendron Publish — free OSS; Dendron's hierarchical-notes publisher.
- See pkm-foam-dendron-vscode.
11ty + markdown — free OSS; flexible if you want a custom garden.
Astro Starlight / Fumadocs / VitePress — for documentation-style gardens; see markdown.
Hugo + obsidian-export — free OSS; popular pre-Quartz pattern; still works.
Foam + GitHub Pages — free OSS; VS Code-flavoured — see pkm-foam-dendron-vscode.
TiddlyWiki — free OSS; the original digital garden tool, single HTML file — see pkm-tiddlywiki-tiddlywiki5.

Obsidian Publish — paid (~$10/mo); hosted version of your Obsidian vault; bidirectional links, dark mode; Andy Matuschak ran on a custom version of similar tech.
Notion Sites — paid + free; Notion as a public site; quick but Notion-shape (no real backlinks in published view).
Roam Publishing — paid; quiet since 2023.
Logseq Publish (cloud) — was paid, the hosted Logseq sync was deprecated 2024 — current: self-host the static export.

Zettelkasten — private, atomic, linked; not necessarily published.
Evergreen — same shape, but the author publishes and intends notes to be readable.
★ Public stakes raise quality. Writing for a reader (even a future-you reader) forces concept clarity.
Style differs. Zettelkasten notes are often telegraphic ("note for myself"); evergreen notes are paragraph-prose.

Seedling → Budding → Evergreen. Visible growth stages on the published page (Maggie Appleton popularised).
★ No /blog URL. Notes have permalinks by ID; updates don't change the URL.
Last-updated dates exposed. Readers see the note evolved.
Bidirectional backlinks rendered. Quartz / Dendron / Foam all support this; vanilla Hugo does not without custom data.
Comments off. Most digital gardens are comment-free; engage with readers via email / mastodon / bluesky.

★ Andy Matuschak — notes.andymatuschak.org (the canonical example; custom-built with Bear's lateral-pane UX).
Maggie Appleton — maggieappleton.com/garden (Gatsby-based; defined the aesthetic).
Joel Hooks — joelhooks.com (one of the originals).
Gwern Branwen — gwern.net (long-form essays as evergreen; not technically a "garden" but spiritually similar).
Bryan Jenks — bryanjenks.dev (Obsidian + Quartz Publish).

Performance anxiety. Treating your garden like a blog means nothing ever ships. The whole point is non-performative.
No links. A garden without links is a blog. Force at least one link per note.
Vault leak. Don't publish your raw private vault; have a publish folder or a published: true frontmatter flag — Quartz supports both.
Over-investment in design. Pick Quartz, deploy, write. Tweak aesthetics in year two.

You want a public PKM: Quartz + Obsidian is the 2026 default.
You're an Emacs user: Org-roam-ui + ox-hugo for publishing — see pkm-org-mode-orgroam.
You want pure-hosted: Obsidian Publish (paid) or Notion Sites — pretty, but lock-in.
You're TiddlyWiki-curious: single-file public wiki is the OG digital garden — see pkm-tiddlywiki-tiddlywiki5.
You only want private notes: stop here — go to pkm-zettelkasten.