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The playful trend of “chaos gardening”

It’s time to tear up the horticultural rulebook and indulge in curiosity.

By Alice Vincent

Living off one of south London’s more frequented roads, I see all sorts of things on the street. A few weeks ago I encountered a solid 150 centimetres of established Monstera deliciosa, or “Swiss Cheese Plant” to those who were fans in the 1970s, cut off at the stump and tossed to the curb, coconut-husk stake still attached.

Poor Monstera, I thought. I suspect it lost the battle with the Christmas tree. Well, there goes the house plant trend.

I’m hardly a Grim Reaper of horticultural fashions, but I do find them fascinating. Remember 2014, when everybody bought tiny little cacti and succulents in drainage-free pots made of poured concrete, and then wondered why they died? I was not immune to that, nor to the trend for hanging a pothos from a macramé sling. My 6ft-tall fiddle-leaf fig tree, now riddled with scale insects, attests to how I gave in to that trend five years ago. (Though we’re quite fond of Christopher Figgins: we’ll keep him and his horrible sticky leaves until he gives up the ghost.)

At this time of year there’s a renewed interest in “gardening trends” for 2025. Not, I don’t think, among gardeners, who have all manner of persuading factors on their plots and intentions for this year besides what is popular on social media. But seeing that Monstera on the side of the road prompted me to think about what is said to be in store for us this year.

The key themes of this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show – not set to open until May, as usual – have been boiled down to: seed-sowing, AI, dogs. More on those as the seasons turn. Instead, we turn to a trend that’s lured me into a TikTok rabbit hole: chaos gardening.

In December, Pinterest recorded that searches of “chaos gardening” were up by 300 per cent. The term emerged in the spring of 2023 on TikTok, thanks to a user called MegGrowsPlants, who maintained that the “best way” to grow carrots (a companion plant, she points out) was to liberally throw a handful of seed all over your growing space. When a carrot pops up – and Meg’s video suggested this happened regularly – she called it a “chaos carrot”.

In comparison to the neat, thinned-out drills that dominate traditional veg-growing law, this approach is certainly unconventional. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it went viral, and now chaos gardening is being practised with other crops in other, largely American, yards (“chaos bok choy” in the gravel beds; black-eyed peas, lentils, and so on), as well as in the West Yorkshire-based garden of a Mrs Claire Hoops. She posted that she’d “never felt so understood” as when discovering chaos gardening in her fifties, filling a jam jar with radish and carrot seeds and scattering them abundantly into tubs. 

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Like many viral TikTok phenomena it’s easy to dismiss chaos gardening as a silly fad. Even the people making the videos have a goofy air as they toss seeds around or sashay down their successful wildflower borders. It is not necessary to point out why this wouldn’t be the most efficient or successful way of raising crops or developing a reliably beautiful flower bed. But I do find it interesting that people are so gleefully celebratory about the approach. After all, many of us have been quietly chaos gardening all along: I liberally – and guiltily – scatter hardy annuals into my flower beds each spring and hope for the best.

Perhaps this is the next inevitable step as gardening shuffles ever closer towards the naturalism and rewilding that has dominated conversations at Chelsea and beyond in recent years. Chaos gardening frequently overlaps with gardening for pollinators and biodiversity, and has a particular interest in wildflower meadows. A cynic would argue that they could skip the dancing with seeds bit and simply let whatever’s flowering set seed of its own accord.

But I find it rather pleasing, all told, these happy people deliberately tearing up horticultural rulebooks to enjoy themselves and indulge in two of gardening’s most overlooked elements: curiosity and play. I’ve no doubt 2025 will hold plenty of the former, but I’m here to welcome the latter.

[See also: Rewriting the story of Gisèle Pelicot]

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This article appears in the 15 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Disruptors