How Social Media Is Inspiring a New Generation of Gardeners
A few years ago, the typical picture of an Irish gardener was someone with a few decades behind them, a good pair of wellies and a shed full of tools that nobody else was allowed to touch. That picture hasn’t disappeared, exactly. But scroll through TikTok or Instagram on any spring evening, and you’ll find people in their twenties showing off tomato plants on apartment balconies, swapping cuttings, or panicking (quite publicly) about a monstera with yellowing leaves. Gardening has found a new audience, and a lot of it started on a phone screen.
Algorithms With Green Fingers
Social platforms learn fast. Watch two or three videos about propagating pothos in jars of water and the app will happily serve up twenty more, then a few on soil mixes, then somebody’s entire back garden makeover. The feeds aren’t fussy, though, and gardening clips share the same space as everything else competing for attention, from streaming trailers to online entertainment platforms such as NetBet Casino, whose offers tend to be built around things like free spins. Plants hold their own surprisingly well in that crowd. People keep coming back to them.
Hashtags like #PlantTok on TikTok have grown into their own little corner of the internet, with houseplant collectors comparing variegated leaves the way other people compare trainers.
Small Spaces, Big Ambitions
Plenty of younger renters in Dublin, Cork or Galway don’t have a garden at all. A balcony, maybe. A windowsill, more likely. Sometimes not even that. Online creators have leaned into that, showing how to grow herbs in window boxes, salad leaves in old crates or strawberries in hanging baskets, and suddenly the lack of land doesn’t seem like such an obstacle.
Sustainability gets a lot of airtime too. The no-dig method championed by English grower Charles Dowding, who has built a large following on YouTube, is something plenty of beginners now hear about online before they ever pick up a spade. Closer to home, GIY, the Waterford-based organisation founded by Michael Kelly, has long encouraged people to grow some of their own food, and its message travels well online.
From Screen to Soil
Inspiration only goes so far if nobody knows how to use a drill. Garden projects often need basic practical skills, building a raised bed, fixing a trellis to a wall, putting up shelving for pots, and that’s where DIY content and gardening start to meet. The Irish School of DIY, set up by Declan Buggy in Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny, is a good example of the overlap between social media and hands-on learning, having built a following on Instagram while running practical courses on basic home maintenance. Watching someone do the job is one thing. Doing it yourself, with a borrowed spirit level and a bit of nerve, is another.
The real test comes outdoors. A video makes sowing seeds look tidy and quick, while actual seeds sulk, rot or get eaten by slugs. Even so, some people who start with a pot of basil on the windowsill end up wanting more space, signing up for an allotment or offering to tidy a neighbour’s overgrown patch.
A Shared Hobby, Not a Solitary One
Gardening used to be a fairly private pastime. Online, it’s anything but. People post failures as readily as successes, and the comment sections under a drooping fiddle-leaf fig can be surprisingly kind, full of strangers suggesting drainage fixes or a sunnier spot. Nobody seems to mind admitting they overwatered something, again.
Pinterest plays a quieter role. Boards full of cottage-garden borders, gravel gardens and painted pallet planters work more like mood boards than tutorials, but they help people picture what a scruffy yard could become before spending a cent at the garden centre.
