Vault Structure
The Commonplace Garden is a thematic repository for collected material and personal elaboration, held in the same space. It lives in a folder on your file system and has two subfolders. If you are starting from a mess, consider Note Bankruptcy.
repository/
Holds all living thought. Notes at any stage of development: a single collected quote, a quote with reaction, an elaboration in progress, a finished synthesis. No obligation of completeness or coherence.
archive/
Holds finished products. A published essay, a delivered chapter, a post that went out. Closed material that no longer changes.
Note Types (Metaphors)
Each note carries a frontmatter field describing its state:
1. Seed
Collected material with no added elaboration. A quote, a fact, a reading note.
2. Graft
Someone else’s material alongside your own annotations. The note holds both the external material and your thought about it.
3. Sprout
Your own elaboration in progress. Something you are thinking through, not yet finished.
4. Fruit
A mature, autonomous synthesis that stands on its own. It does not reference external material as its primary content.
Important: These are states, not a mandatory progression. A seed can remain a seed forever. A fruit can appear without passing through earlier stages.
Index Pages
Index pages are reactive, not proactive. They emerge from need — specifically, from the need to see related notes side by side. When you realize you have several notes on a theme, you create a note that gathers them. You do not organize in order to write; you write, and organization emerges. See Discoverability Strategies for more.
The Fruit as a Springboard
Fruit notes naturally function as starting points for future work. They contain a complete enough thought that they can be picked up and developed further. They tend to attract links naturally because they are complete thoughts with strong titles.