The Gardener's Prerogative: On Letting Your Site Grow Wild
There is a particular kind of gardener, often found in old cottage gardens, who works with a different philosophy. They don't fight the land; they converse with it. They observe where the poppies self-seed with abandon and where the mint threatens to become a tyrant. Their goal isn't a rigid, geometric perfection but a thriving, living system. This gardener understands that control is not about imposition, but about gentle guidance.
In our digital gardens—our websites—we are often taught to be the opposite. We are the architects, the masons, the librarians, meticulously planning every path, every shelf, every brick. We are told to prune our site structures with ruthless efficiency, to corral our content into neat, logical silos connected by the deliberate, calculated threads of internal links. This is not wrong. It is a valid and powerful way to build.
But it is not the only way.
There is a case to be made for the wild patch at the edge of the property. It’s the part of the site that grew organically, not from a plan, but from genuine, spontaneous creation. It might be an old blog category that was used for a year and then abandoned, now a quiet thicket of posts that still, somehow, attract the right kind of visitor. It could be a series of internal links that formed naturally through the act of writing, not through a strategic audit—a hyperlink placed not because it was optimal, but because it was true to the thought.
Canonicalization and redirects are our shears and spades. They are essential for managing the chaos that can strangle growth. But their purpose is not to eliminate every wild tendril. Sometimes, the value of a page isn't its perfect placement in a hierarchy, but its unique, unexpected connection to three other disparate ideas. A visitor stumbling upon this through an obscure internal link doesn't experience a broken journey; they experience discovery.
The gardener’s prerogative is to know when to intervene and when to simply watch. To redirect a broken path, yes, but to also let some pages exist without a perfectly defined parent. To understand that a site, like an ecosystem, has a vitality of its own that can’t always be predicted by a sitemap. Our tools for structure are not for creating a sterile museum but for tending a living, breathing thing. Sometimes, the most authentic user experience isn't found on the paved promenade, but on the little dirt path that winds off into the trees, just to see where it goes.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: