Doug Engelbart, the guy who developed one of the first working versions of hypertext had a great marginal comment on his copy of As We May Think's "bow example". It simply says "structure grows".
Those two words, together -- "structure grows" -- that's the essence of what I call The Garden. The idea of the garden is to take these wild one-off ideas and place them in relation to each other. To groom and arrange them. Things grow -- that's the organic side, but by a sort of reverse entropy as they grow they become more structured, more holistic, more connected. Meaning increases as one thing plays off of one another. The whole becomes much more meaninful than the parts.
And it is structure, not narrative. When we've got that garden constructed we can walk through it in many different ways. There's no dominant path through the garden. That's one reason the friend can use the structure put together by reader number one so easily. The information on the physics of the bow can have many different (and even contradictory) meanings depending on where you arrive from. Just as a single garden supports many paths through it a persons memex knowledge graph can support many narratives.