Gardeners are the exact opposite of Architects. They tend to think in a “bottom-up” way, cultivating many kinds of ideas and possibilities at the same time like seedlings sprouting in a wild garden. They are most at home imagining, dreaming, wandering, and making spontaneous creative connections in a way that no upfront plan could ever predict. Knowledge gardening is about favoring relationships and connections, so that each individual seed can entangle itself with others and grow into something greater than the sum of its parts. The Gardener’s job is to create space for them to emerge, to cross-pollinate promising ideas, and harvest them once they’ve matured. This requires a nurturing, exploratory approach of protecting new ideas until they’re ready to make their debut. The pitfall of Gardeners is that they often don’t know where they are headed. They can sometimes go off on tangents too easily and get distracted by new information that might be fascinating, but has nothing to do with their goals.
