Recently, reels of time-lapse flower beds have surfaced on my phone’s screen: humble patches of dirt, tilled between the siding of a house and a stretch of lawn, rapidly transformed into a riot of color, a feast of bobbing blossoms. This is “chaos gardening”—a social-media-fueled movement that has been gaining traction among a certain kind of gardener wanting to stage a small-scale rebellion against the strictures of horticulture on a patch of dirt. No need for planning, plotting, skill, or experience. You don’t even need to step into a nursery; a dusty packet of seeds from the hardware store will do.
Chaos gardening is a few steps removed from the free-form, untamed idea of the English garden aesthetic that might seem its spiritual antecedent. It’s not even really akin to the modern-meadow movement, which emphasizes native plants and ecological restoration and usually involves considered deployment of specific species. Rather, the practice puts faith in chance, whim, and inspiration. It embraces serendipity and celebrates mistakes. In one TikTok video (with 4.6 million views and counting), a gardener who goes by The Chaos Gardener describes her four-year-old daughter’s adventure with a purloined packet of sunflower seeds, which she surreptitiously planted in her sandpit—resulting in the tallest and sturdiest stalk her mother had ever seen. “Here’s the trick,” says popular TikTok gardener Farm Boy James, while flinging handfuls of dried lentils and black-eyed peas over his shoulder, “there isn’t a trick.”
My own backyard adventures have been less chaotic: trips to the garden store with a budget and a palette in mind, sketches and lists with staggered bloom cycles considered. But every book I’ve read or class I’ve taken has elicited both a sense of encouragement and intimidation regarding the vast array of knowledge still beyond my reach. There are parts of gardening that can feel intuitive (water when dry) and parts that feel almost paradoxical. It took a firm rosarian at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to persuade me to hack my rose vines down to spindly shin-level spears, denuded of crisscrossing branches. “Trust me,” she said, “they’re going to love it.”
So there was something undeniably appealing about throwing caution to the wind. A neighbor friend has a field of echinacea flowers in her front yard that by mid-summer looks like hundreds of emojis have popped up to flank her stoop, drunk-seeming bumblebees buzzing between them. She had read all the Piet Oudolf books, she told me, but when it came time to plant, she just tossed handfuls of seeds in the air. Could I transform a bare little corner of my backyard with the same spirit of abandon?
At the gardening store I bought packets of blackberry lily, cardinal climber, lobelia, aster, echinacea, lavender, and thyme seeds. At the last minute I added a packet of outhouse hollyhock, a plant so deemed because it has been known to grow tall and dense enough that it can create a screen for outdoor facilities. No privy in my backyard, but the bulky plastic compost wheel could use some camouflage. How did this selection rank according to my typical measures? Were these native? Not really, it turned out when I googled them later. Invasive? Oops, maybe a little, in some cases. I had planned to divide the plot—one half sown spontaneously, the other benefiting from more attention paid to spacing—but my own four-year-old daughter seemed to sense that approach was not in keeping with the spirit of the endeavor and proceeded to scatter at will. At the last minute I remembered that Ffern, the delectable organic fragrance company, had sent me a packet of cornflower, lady’s bedstraw, and red campion with its newest, very pleasing seasonal scent, so I threw that in too. About 27 seconds later we were done. We gently trod on the soil, gave it a spray of water, and walked away.