Here’s another one of those fun fads that have gone utterly viral. It might be even more ridiculous than “No Mow May,”
Are you ready? Chaos gardening.
I might be late to the party, since it’s been going on for at least a few months, with prominence at last May’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show and in a popular TikTok video of about the same vintage. (Don’t think for a second that I’ll be providing links to any of this crap. I am sure it can be easily googled.)
Anyway, the idea is as simple as it can be. Just gather up all your leftover seed packets, mix all the seeds together and throw them all over the place.
The one thing I will give this is that it is true to its name. Vegetable, flower, herb – it doesn’t matter. If even half the seeds germinate, assuming you have at least 25 half-full packs, you will indeed have quite a mess. Which is good, because that’s what chaos is supposed to be. Pick your definition, but “complete disorder and confusion” is as accurate as any.
Ah, but no. Many of the proponents of this style – according to articles I’ve scanned in BH&G and Ideal Home, to name two – have seen fit to add rules. They want you to thin varieties out, watch for diseases, amend your soil first, pay attention to sun and shade, choose native plants, avoid invasive ones, etc. etc.
Come on, people! You’re taking the chaos out!
If it were me, providing I had a blank patch of ground, which I’d need to effectively sow chaos, I’d mix up a big bowl of seeds, scatter them and let ‘er rip. No watering, no thinning, no choosing.
It would be fun. Nothing to do with gardening, of course, and, ideally, this would happen in a space apart from my actual garden.
But for someone who wants a carefree garden or who is just starting out, this would be the last thing I’d recommend. It’s a recipe for frustration, annoyance, disappointment and, ultimately, the end of further gardening attempts.
I get it. Thankfully, I don’t write about gardening or style full-time, or I, too, might be grabbing at any silliness that came along just to have something new to talk about.
That’s not the case, so I’m free to just garden. I don’t let go of expectations. I try to make damn sure that what I expect will come to pass. Surprises and disappointments will always come, but it might be best not to try a strategy that ensures them.
There are no pictures of chaos gardening here, because the pictures in the articles I have seen are clearly carefully tended and planted spaces. So I’ve just included some images from my garden. Some people think it’s messy.
Ooh, that does sound dumb. Your garden looks wonderfully floriferous! On my recent tour through some of Buffalo’s gardens, I would say the trend was ‘packed full’ gardens with only enough room to walk single file on paths. That & amazing coleous plants everywhere!
And here I am trying to figure out how to add a little more order to the carefully planted gardens that I have. I try to keep my OCD/ADHD at bay when gardening, but Chaos is something for an old Get Smart episode. I couldn’t stand it in my garden.
I used to live in Central Texas, home to rocky soil, hot summers, and an amazing range of annual and perennial wildflowers.
One year, I selected over twenty plants to grow from seed in a cultivated but mulch-free bed that already featured about 10% shrubs. Most of my seeds were native, but some were non-invasive exotics I hoped to get the thrill of discovering that they would perform in my tough climate.
Mixing the seeds and scattering them around (I did actually make a tall mix for the center and a short mix for the edges) was a good tactic for me. I wanted to end up with a self-reseeding population of just the plants that would thrive. I wasn’t content with the usual suspects, so I was experimenting with a lot of unusual plants, most of which I expected wouldn’t make it. I didn’t want to waste money or effort on purchasing plants or starting transplants.
Sure enough, only five plants were winners – but then I knew, and I had them! Echinacea purpurea, Monarda citriodora, Euphorbia bicolor, Orlaya grandiflora, and Verbena rigida. And they continued to multiply over the next few years I lived there.
The main downside was that non-mulched beds suitable for growing seeds are super susceptible to weed seeds too, especially if there is decent soil and water. I spent a lot of time peering at the second or third pair of emerging leaves to discern wanted seedlings from weed seedlings! And even so, my perennial weeds exited the season victorious because the total plant growth got too thick to find and pull them all. (Texas weeds are resilient.)
A direct-seeded flower patch does not make for a tidy-looking bed, even when shrubs are anchoring it. Still, in that part of my property, it worked for me. And as a gardener, the fun experience was as important to me as the resulting aesthetic. I always like having a “test plot” going.
Gardening is not really easy. Chaos is!
A Gentle Please for Chaos by Mirabel Osler (1998)… good. Scattering leftover seeds and living with whatever comes up… as you rightly said… “dumb.” Just another poorly thought out trend brought to us by TikTok, and now even Garden Media Group is calling it a trend for 2024. Please, book publishers, do not find an influencer to write a book about this!
LOL. Amen.
My gardening is chaotic enough without actually trying for it!
i admit I let the birds dabble in a little chaos gardening all winter, ending with a nice stand of free sunflowers of unknown type in some location near the deck feeder. but even that chaos site must be mitigated with clean up or it ends up a dead zone of shells and stalks. Nature abhores true chaos and shuts it down in her own time .
I must admit I bristled a bit at first as I started reading. I think my greatest delights as a gardener are things that I didn’t plan: a stray seed that sends up a plant that mingles pleasingly with those around it. Some unknown seed that blows into the garden and that I let go to see what it is before deciding if it stays or gets the heave ho. Or the year my beloved Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick died and on a whim I spray painted it deep purple, enjoying it for a few more years as garden art before it decayed. I personally loved the pics in the article, and alas, at the end you revealed they were pics of your own exuberant, lovely, but not “planned chaotic” garden. I think you should have included pics of what this new “true chaos” style is about so we can see what this is all about. I’m going to Google it now.
You can google, but all the images I saw looked like stock wildflower plantings that probably took a lot of planning and work.
I told my tenants to go ahead with sowing some packets of seeds last year: three kinds of wild flowers and/or mixed perennials. Here’s a photo from June 28, this tear, when I couldn’t stand the chaos any more! The rudbeckia and gaillardia overwhelmed the middle, other annuals dried out after spring, the ‘anchor’ perennials I’d been nurturing were swamped. I’ve been cutting plants back that toppled over onto the sidewalk and the road. Now the plan is to wrestle it back to my original design: various perennials that like baking NC heat, in some kind of order! Hm, can’t see how to attach a photo… sorry!
GREAT RANT I must be living under a rock, because I’d not heard of this before. So I googled it & landed on the story you saw. Absolutely ludicrous that this made it into H&G, and as you said in your comments, all the stock photos were of planned plantings. Nuts. Dangerous even. A local city near us got a pretty, but non-native seed mix for their road verges. They unwittingly spread invasive field scabious like wildfire through Blackland Prairie remnants. I’m all for putting together a mix of appropriate native seeds and going for it in a big way on property where it belongs. And, more power to you if you feel like gathering together a mix of selected happy companions (cosmos/cleome/zinnias) in a garden bed, but this chaos concept is insane. But to just randomly grab and mix and walk away expecting gorgeous is just INSANE.
What is lovely, I’ve heard is YOUR garden. A gardener friend just got back from the Buffalo Walk and she had many compliments for your intentional efforts. Well done!
Thanks, Jenny! Your ears must have been ringing last weekend. I had some of your neighbors by that were full of praise for your gardening writing.
“Thankfully, I don’t write about gardening or style full-time, or I, too, might be grabbing at any silliness that came along just to have something new to talk about.” – so true Elizabeth. It’s all about finding the new thing. – MW
Or the latest paranoia, as with your critique of the poison plant alarmists.
I did that to a front yard planting back in 2008. We’d just come out of construction, and there was a completely empty 15 x 20 +/- patch that I didn’t have a budget for, or what to do with it. So, I went for a ‘meadow’ look and gathered all my left over seeds, both veg and flowers and threw it everywhere. We added perimeter irrigation, as we live in CA and threw a couple bags of potting soil over it. In a few months it was in full bloom. It was beautiful!!! It was predominantly poppies and cornflowers, but several others were mixed in as well. It lasted two years and then it became too straggly, but several people commented on how lovely it was that first year. Our lives were truly chaotic back then, so I guess the label fits.
Was it concocted just so trend reports could include it? Lol
I did this once with a berm I’d built of flipped over clods between our yard and the neighbors. I wasn’t going to be able to plant shrubs until the fall, so I took every partial seed packet I had, vegetable, herb and flower, tossed it out there, and kept it watered. It was great fun to see what emerged. Winter squash and calendula dominated, along with dill and fennel (the first time I’d ever successfully grown them from seed!) and I can’t remember what else, but it looked great all summer in a Dr. Seuss-ey kind of way. However, it was definitely a one off, a place holder that was not part of my “real” garden.
Isn’t the whole concept of gardening just a creation of order from chaos?