My Dear Gardener,
There were nearly 1.2 million posts on TikTok this year tagged #LeaveTheLeaves. The pushback hashtag #ItDependsOnYourYard can only claim 4k. Not surprisingly, #FFSStopGardeningByMeme didn’t even get a look in.
It’s time to realize that nuanced messages rarely stick or share as well as simplistic imperatives. Particularly if they are aimed at tender hearts and/or soft heads.
Broad generalizations are the future, my gardening friend. They are the essence of the reductionist and/or slogan-based advice flooding our social media feeds through the global magic of meme culture, and the obstinate gardener would be wise to get on board. It’s just…easier.
Hopefully by now you’ve decided to give up and start your own movement on the back of a punchy slogan you coined (and possibly trademarked). I offer these tips for making your gardening-by-meme campaign a roaring success:
Use sexy plants – even when they make no sense.
Xerces.org has many resources for gardening-by-meme
Sex sells. And succulents are sexy. And adorable.
What’s more sharable than a meme that features the sexiest of all – echeveria – artfully framed by fallen foliage; and which also paints the gardener as gentle hero?
There are problems in paradise of course. Sex or no sex, this marriage of a semi-arid desert succulent smothered in leaves from a moist, Eastern temperate forest has a 0% chance of survival. Planting sun loving succulents at the base of shrubs that not only prefer summer shade, but cast it, can dampen the most passionate fires.
Inconveniently, Hydrangea quercifolia won’t grow in zones warmer than 9; and very few Echeveria can cut anything colder than Zone 10. This detail might send the gardener meme-maker back to Canva to hunt for another photo. That would be a mistake.
After all, these are complex details, and complex details are not the point of gardening-by-meme. Otherwise you’d have to cumbersomely acknowledge that some plants we grow in our gardens that originate from desert, tundra, alpine, and Mediterranean climates do not benefit by either blanket statements or blankets of leaves, and would prefer to sleep cold, dry, and naked.
Or that heroic actions on behalf of “the little guys” leaves gardeners in a Sophie’s Choice situation. A recent study would suggest that there is no good time to remove the leaves without disturbing emergence patterns that happen all year.
Nevermind. The point is to virtuously leave the leaves, and look flipping amazing when you do it. Sexy. Tousled. And half covered by a blanket.
#ReadySetHashtag
Hastaggable slogans that trip off the tongue, and are clearly true by virtue of alliteration, assonance or rhyme, are key to a successful and long running gardening-by-meme campaign. Choose wisely and there may even be the respectability of a patent office in your future.
Screenshot: Plantlife.co.uk
Learn from the meme-makers and shakers. Seven years on and the #NoMowMay campaign is still going strong. Plantlife.co.uk trademarked the slogan, and added #LetItBloomJune, followed presumably by #NowTheyCanDieJuly when tepid followers of the movement get figuratively sick of playing ball games or entertaining in long grass; and then get literally sick from a succession of tick-borne illnesses.
Don’t let that stop you from creating your own campaign that doesn’t concern itself with trifling questions of livability and practicality, or indeed, what happens next. That’s not what gardening-by-meme is about. It’s all about NOW baby. And shareability.
Pepper Your Posts with Pollinators
When it comes to viral gardening memes, photos of pollinators on flowers are hard to beat and harder to criticize, so if you’ve come up with a memeable slogan that doesn’t hold up to more than the half-second examination of a casual thumb scroll, it’s best to distract occasional censure by going big on both. Even if they’re cartoons.
Forget social media. You can get your own powerful poster right now at Zazzle. (Screenshot: Zazzle.com)
Successful campaigns can thus protect themselves against good faith scrutiny by forcing the occasional ill-advised critic into the position of being anti-pollinator, and if necessary, anti-flower. Anti-garden, anti-native, anti-science, and anti-Earth are binary bonuses, but they are not necessary.
Social media pile-ons can be harsh – let them work for you.
Frame Your Opponents as Ancient
There will still be foolhardy critics. Some of whom can play into your hands by reflexively and loudly decrying your memeable movement based on nothing other than stubborn resistance to change, and a devotion to chemicals and perfection.
Be grateful for them. These are valuable allies in your campaign — as your other, more dangerous critics (those tied to outdated concepts such as ‘experience’, ‘replicable studies’, ‘complex systems’, and ‘discussion’) can be deftly shoved into the box those allies have built for you – all topped with an Old-Fashioned, Irrelevant, Over-50s bow.
Let your thoughtful detractors tie that bow themselves with too many words in an X thread; or bore with too many facts in a TikTok explanation; or confuse with posts and articles sporting Flesch-Kincaid reading ease scores of 30 and lower. The more they explain, the tighter the bow.
Then, in a brilliant coup de grace, revel in the fun of halting discussion and gaining friends and further allies by inserting easily digestible and highly comedic memes throughout any comment threads that may be showing signs of persuading others.
Go beyond ‘Okay Boomer’ to punch them where it hurts: cultural relevancy.
Screenshot: Tenor.com
Take a Moral Tone
Finally, the almost effortless punch. The most successful gardening-by-meme campaigns add a subtle moral message to the mix, particularly through the use of anthropomorphism to encourage the well-documented underdog effect in the human mind.
Screenshot: Plantlife.co.uk
Care must be taken. Moral messages are not utilized to admonish ardent followers or potential followers with the message. Instead messages are utilized to encourage the immediate sharing of your meme on their feed for the express purpose of admonishing others.
After all, the only thing more delicious than feeling virtuous, is letting others know how virtuous you are. It’s the perfect recipe for a quick and easy share. And that, my friend, is the game we’re now playing. Play it well.
–Your affectionate Auntie,
SCREWTAPE
Love #NowTheyCanDieJuly ! Great stuff!
Bwahaha, thanks Marianne!
You have such a way with words!! This was the best!
Thank you — a bit of fun. –MW
A word in (nervous!) defense of Xerces. Perhaps they mixed up those plants from different climates partly to be humorous and partly just to make an appealing picture? I found their message more tolerable than talking frogs and birds.
No need to be nervous Frances. I promise I don’t bite. 🙂 I doubt there is humor at work here — just an easily-digestible and easily shareable message. I’ve just come in from being out in my garden clearing some leaves from the bases and/or crowns of some of my plants (lavender & some hardy succulents), leaving other plants alone, and smiling at the leaves piled up in other areas. I’m a proponent of ecologically sound practices, just not blanket statements. They can lead new gardeners with less experience up the garden path. –MW
Can’t wait for a meme claiming the #1 gardening moral issue. “Leave native leaves ONLY in your landscape.” I suppose non-native leaves should be shipped back? Burned? Never compost non-native plants? The mind reels at the potential conundrum of native purists.
I like to think that would be a bridge too far. –MW
Sometimes I believe that we gardeners and we ecology folk (leave the leaves, no mow May, and the rest…..) are in a world of our own. Drive through most neighborhoods where the residents actually care about their properties … they are caring busy people so they rake up the leaves,, cut the lawn in early spring….. seemingly unaware that attitudes hopefully based on good science would have them behave differently. I heard Doug Tallamy speak at the University of Buffalo last week. We were a room full of environmentalists, Audubon Society members, Master Gardeners, and so forth. Sometimes I think we are preaching to each other..
Thanks for your comment Carol Ann, you make a good point. The weed-and-feeders are not necessarily gardeners, but some of them can be reached with thoughtful, realistic messaging that meets them where they are, not where we think they should be. Simplistic memes don’t do that. They can have the opposite effect in fact.
I think it starts with being painfully honest. Elements that a naturalist or ecologist [understandably] finds beautiful in wild spaces, may not be a gardener’s idea of beautiful in a cultivated space. Particularly a small urban space. We’ve seriously blurred those lines in the last decade and expected that everyone needs to accept the naturalist’s idea of beautiful, not the gardener’s. We’ve even attached a moral framework to it, and lumped gardeners into two boxes — either out-of-touch traditionalists, or progressive naturalists.
But many many gardeners desire more order than chaos in their gardens — even as they cherish biodiversity –and not only don’t want to be judged for it, but don’t want to feel responsible for the wholesale insect and plant destruction that takes place all over the United States with the spraying of glyphosate on millions of acres of arable land each year. They want to create art. They want celebrate great/rare/cool plants. They want to encourage their friends and families to join them outside. And they don’t want to take on more work (like ripping out an easily mowable, small lawn and putting in a higher maintenance native perennial bed)
The messages that have touched me the most, and made me change the way I approach my gardening life for the better are those that do not disparage or redefine my concept of beauty; but recognize that I’m primarily building a garden that buzzes with life and joy — not a wildlife sanctuary out of guilt or duty. -MW
Thank you for your support! I would have loved to have a more wild and carefree garden, but hubby and the HOA would have none of that! I do what I can.
Did I miss something? How does one trademark a hashtag, slogan, or quote. Better yet, what if you see someone using it?
Thank you for this rant & in particular your reply to Carol Ann Harlos. That reply explains the last few years in social media gardening to a T.