Grab Some Seeds. Throw Them at the Soil. You’re a Gardener Now.
Welcome to chaos gardening, a laid-back way to turn a patch of ground into a riot of color.
May 10, 2026
Gardening is hard. You have to know the names of plants, sometimes in Latin. You spend a lot of time digging and weeding. You stare at the furrows, hoping the seeds come to life. You worry about weather and soil nitrogen supply. Gardening can also be an expensive pursuit, at least if you want bespoke, handcrafted tools like a $119 weeding knife. All that may be why it can seem like a hobby for rich retirees.
In a rebuke to that stodgy image, many gardeners are embracing a free-form approach called chaos gardening. It involves two main steps: First, get a bunch of seeds. Then throw them at the ground.
There’s often a third step, too: Make a before-and-after video to show everyone how you transformed a patch of dirt into a lush scene out of a Monet painting.
“Chaos gardening is the way forward,” one commenter wrote under a popular TikTok video documenting the progress of a chaos garden, adding, “I see people putting little seeds in their individual pots. Nah, no time for that mate.”
Elizabeth Boitnott, 31, who lives in the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia, got in on the trend two years ago. “I don’t have a green thumb, but I do like gardening,” Boitnott said in an interview. “I came across a video on TikTok, and I just did it.”
Without having done much serious research, she bought some seed packets at Dollar Tree. She ripped them open, mixed them in a bucket and scattered them across a rectangular flower bed. Then she covered the seeds with soil and watered the plot.
All the while, she was making videos, one of which now has 1.4 million views. It shows how she transformed her humble patch of dirt into a riot of color, with zinnias, cosmos and coreopsis practically mugging for the camera.
“It feels freeing, especially for people who feel like they’re failing at traditional gardening,” Boitnott said.
Despite its name, chaos gardening has nothing to do with chaos theory — but it may have come in reaction to the sameness that has seeped into daily life as algorithmic preferences override serendipitous discoveries. It also offers re-engagement with the real world at a time when “touch grass” has become internet shorthand advice to those who have grown overly dependent on screens.
At the same time, a successful gardening effort presents a tableau nicely suited to social media: Oh, just a little garden I threw together between marathon training and reading “Moby Dick.”
“The goal is to keep it fun and not overthink it,” said James Weston, who is known to his hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and TikTok as Farm Boy James.
“I started chaos gardening after a hurricane wiped out a garden I had spent hours carefully planting,” Weston continued. “Instead of starting over the ‘right’ way, I grabbed a cheap bag of dried beans and tossed them around, and they grew just fine.
“I was out there snacking on beans,” he added, “still getting a harvest even after everything went wrong.”
Weston had some advice for would-be chaos gardeners: Go big. The bigger the seed, the greater its chance of survival. “Beans, corn, lentils and birdseed sunflowers work great,” he said. “You can throw tomato seeds out, too, but the idea is to keep it simple.”
Most journeys into chaos gardening begin at a hardware store or nursery, in front of a metal carousel stacked with seed packets. Here also awaits your first choice: annuals or perennials?
Annuals include flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. They grow fast but won’t come back the next spring (though they will drop seeds and possibly propagate). Perennials like lavender and sage will return year after year, but they may take longer to grow. Wildflower and pollinator packets often contain both annual and perennial seeds but are frowned upon by some serious gardeners, because the selection can be haphazard and ill-suited to the area.
It’s a good idea to exercise a little situational awareness. How much rain can you expect? How much sunlight? Dig the earth and feel it between your fingers — is it sandy? Loamy? These are things to keep in mind as you prepare for your journey into horticultural chaos.
“You want to prepare your soil, your site, at least a little bit,” said Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape expert at Colorado State University Extension in Longmont, Colo. “Try to get rid of weeds. Make sure the soil is ready to receive seeds.”
Davidson, who has written about chaos gardening, strongly advised covering the seeds with a layer of soil, lest they become bird food. As for watering, that depends on where you live, she added. On the whole, though, the formula is straightforward: “Soil, sun and water is what these seeds need,” Davidson said.
Not everyone is a fan of the trend, or at least the way it has been portrayed on social media. “Nature is not chaos — nature is pattern,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which recommends imbuing modern life with Indigenous wisdom.
“It seems unrealistic,” Kimmerer said of the chaos gardening videos she has watched. The feeling of effortlessness they convey — a common social media effect, almost always the result of deft editing — seems to elide the work that goes into a garden, whether chaotic or not, she suggested.
“I want my garden to be natural and biodiverse,” she said. “That’s a good impulse. I don’t think this technique is going to get you there, but that’s an important impulse.”
Boitnott, the maker of the viral video, offered a simple reason for why chaos gardening has become popular: “It just makes you happy.”
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