Any Redditors out there? Reddit is a free place to discuss anything in the world with people interested in the same topic, gathered in what are called subreddits (currently 138,000+ of them). Monthly traffic is almost 2 billion, and if you’ve never gone there on purpose, I bet that search engines have sent you there.

I’ve joined and scrolled, posted and commented, and boy, is it an interesting world, including what goes on in the many subreddits relevant to gardening, which I’ll cover first before venturing off-topic. My conclusion is that the Reddit community of gardeners can be incredibly helpful. 

Here are the gardening-related subs I’ve joined, so far: gardening (1 million visitors per week), nativeplantgardening (almost 80,o00 members), pollinatorgardens, butterflygardening, gardenwild, arborists, landscapearchitecture, landscaping, landscapedesigns, and landscapingtips.

What’s truly amazing to me is the kind of detailed help that commenters are willing to provide in answer to requests for help, from the very most basic (above) to the most professional of details.  

Look at these first photos of empty yards – they’re starting from scratch, can’t afford professional help, but are getting free advice on Reddit. The quality of the responses varies, of course, but I’ve read dozens of ideas I thought were promising, even ones I’d never have thought of myself.  I don’t know how many professionals participate, but especially in the landscaping subs, I’m guessing a lot. And they’re so generous with their time.

Beyond the many posts asking “Where do I start?” or “What should I plant here?” another common favorite topic is how to create privacy, which leads to the ever-popular topic of arborvitaes and how much people hate them. 

Look – there’s even a subreddit named ArborvitaeAreGarbage! Notice that a suggested tag for that group is “Another dead arborvitae.” I have some stories for them.

There’s also a sub called /fuckbradfordpeartrees.
Redditors pose lots of pruning questions, which yield particularly good answers. There are also questions about hardscaping that I’m learning from.

Lawn Haters, and Lawn Lovers, too

I’d say the most action of any plant-related topic, though, is about lawns, to no one’s surprise who’s ever read this blog. But on Reddit there’s both pro and con, with very different membership, though sometimes a lawn-hater will post in the r/lawncare and get shooed back to where they belong – or vice versa.

In the anti-lawn world, your top choices are r/nolawn, r/nolawns, and r/fucklawns. But there’s lots of crossover between those and the native plant and wild gardening group.

Examples of posts at r/nolawns.

In the anti-lawn groups not everyone has the same reasons to be anti-lawn, so the group can get rowdy, usually because not everyone on board with the natives-only approach. Invasives, astroturf and even concrete may be mentioned in a positive light!

(On this native-plant podcast a moderator of the nolawns subreddit said “people are a lot more hyped-up and stressed-out because nolawns means different things to different people.”  I’ve noticed this also happens in the general gardening and landscaping groups, where there are lots of calls for natives-only.)

I first joined Reddit to find people who might be interested in the photos of lawnless front yards I’ve collected – now about 375 of them, none AI-generated. I figured the anti-lawn groups were the perfect place to find people who’ll appreciate seeing creative alternatives to front-yard lawns and indeed they appreciated them so much, they “upvoted” the hell out of them and now I acquired 7,200 karma points in just four months!

Reddit taking some getting used to

If none of that makes sense to you, “upvoting” is Reddit’s version of “liking,” but it’s better because you can also downvote someone who’s being a jerk or giving bad advice. Downvotes move your post down on the screen, upvotes do the opposite and also earn you Reddit karma – a measure of your positive contributions to the site. (Some subs have minimum karma requirements for participating in the group – in order to keep out the bots.) 

But there’s more, because Reddit has lots of rules designed to keep the community civil and helpful, and at least in the ones I follow, it works. 

To learn more about Reddit, I listened to the interview with cofounder Alexis Ohanian on “How I Built This.” I found Ohanian soooo appealing, I can now see why Serene Williams married him. 

Newbies are encouraged to join r/NewToReddit and read the damn rules before moderators downvote or remove you for noncompliance. Funnily enough, I got a two-week suspension from the r/gardening group for posting the link to a blog post. Oh well, it’s not my favorite group anyway – it’s mostly close-ups.

All those rules about civility aside, don’t assume everyone sugar-coats their advice because boy, honesty can be brutal. Here’s an example:

Those three comments reflect the many more that this post received.

And some things on Reddit I’ll never understand

Before I leave the plant world, there’s one sub – marijuanaenthusiasts – that showed up on my feed and made me wonder, why me? What did I click on to make that happen? But weirdly, no. It’s a sub about trees, and the sub description does not explain the name, so interpret as you will. 

Non-plant-related, too!

Now for the shocker – I have some other interests! And Reddit has plenty to choose from. (If not, I could start a new one). So far, these are the other subs I’ve joined: hooping and Flowarts (because I hoop dance and am learning poi), UMD (where I’m a student), nonfiction books, cat training (which has assured me that my kitten’s behavior problems could be much worse, and taught me some good training tips.) 

More recently, I’ve turned to Reddit again to connect with people interested in the memoir “Hippies in Europe, 1969” that I wrote with my college boyfriend.  I found kindred spirits in these these subs: 1960s, Actual Hippies (to distinguish it from the crappy “hippie community” sub), boomers, folk, Joni Mitchell, memoir, Oberlin, travel writing, and Old School Cool, which claims an unbelievable 19 million members. 

I needed help with the blogger.com program I used for publishing the memoir so for a while I followed r/blogger and r/blogspot. With my questions answered, I soon left them because the posts were mostly from brand-new bloggers expecting to make money easily and complaining that the SEO advice they’ve followed hasn’t worked yet. (Not a shock to discover that blogs by people who select the topic they cover based on google searches for it are not exactly high quality content. Who’d have thought?) 

One more (so far): I followed r/thegildedage when the latest season was streaming.

One more cry for help on Reddit.

Anyone else using Reddit? For gardening or anything else?