When Meghan Markle recently posted a haul from her flower garden—and admitted she loves to sprinkle flecks of dried flowers atop her meals—the Internet reacted with its typical restraint (absolutely none). On Instagram, Blake Lively said she feels “like the luckiest person on the planet” when she gardens and assembles fresh flower arrangements. “I think of life as a garden.… You get to replant, start again, and make it yours,” Pamela Anderson wrote in the caption of a slideshow showing off her roses. The celebrities have dismissed their gardeners—or at least hidden them out of frame.
Call it the floral flex: Perfectly posed, flawlessly lit, often sanitized of any actual dirt, it’s social media content meant to convey a level of expertise in feminine cultivation that’s not entirely untethered from tradwifedom.
“I think that there’s definitely been an emphasis on cultivating beautiful gardens this year,” says Lydia Millen, a U.K.-based influencer who shares her gardening and home-decor adventures with her more than 1.6 million followers. Millen got into gardening during the COVID lockdown, when she was spending all her time at home. Though she started with herbs and vegetables, she’s focused much of this year on caring for geraniums and English roses, plants that are more about aesthetic appeal than homesteading. And she’s not alone.
Dan Kennedy
Millen in her garden.
In its 2025 trend report, Pinterest shared that searches for “flower garden” are up 259 percent. “Chaos gardening”—mixing and scattering flower seeds at random and seeing what happens—recently took over TikTok, capturing the interest of wildly popular influencers like Monet McMichael.
Sarah Hayroyan, a gardening influencer with nearly 60,000 followers on Instagram, has noticed more and more people on social media getting into flower gardening this year.
“I think with everyone being online so much these days, a lot of us are looking for ways to unplug and reconnect with more creative hobbies and the outdoors,” she says. “I think people are drawn to flower gardening in particular for a similar reason I am—it’s beautiful. It can also be lower effort and more approachable than growing fruits and vegetables.”
“I think of life as a garden.… You get to replant, start again, and make it yours.” —Pamela Anderson
For Millen, tending to her flowers is a salve to the “hustle culture” she used to be steeped in.
“I got into my career very much in the girl-boss era,” she says. “I still think that that was a really empowering moment as a woman, but… I lacked that balance of enjoying my career, and also having those grounding moments and that ability to regain perspective.”
She continues: “Once you really think about how many organisms there are just in, like, a handful of soil, it really puts it into perspective.”
In a recent interview with i-D magazine, Nara Smith, a model and influencer who is perhaps one of the best-known tradwives, expressed her love of flowers and said that, though she doesn’t currently garden, she wants to get into it. Perhaps she could start by purchasing this pair of $22 flower shears, for sale in the storefront of fellow influencer/tradwife Hannah “Ballerina Farm” Neeleman.
Despite its embrace by the well-heeled among us, the focus on simplicity and self-sufficiency in the face of rising inflation and economic woes also means flower gardening might be more of a recession indicator than those with even the most well-manicured gardens might care to admit.
As Millen put it on Instagram, “I’d rather roses on my table than Birkins in my closet.”
Jessica Roy is the former Digital Director of ELLE.com. Prior to that, she worked as the News Editor of New York Magazine’s The Cut. She likes baking, running, and Instagrams of your dog.
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