by Carol Barany, Master Gardener
“Grab Some Seeds, Throw Them at the Soil, And You’re Done.”
Now that’s a headline that will grab a gardener’s attention.
The title of a story by Alexander Nazaryan in the May 10, 2026 New York Times, a friend cut it out and mailed it to me.
It’s all about ‘Chaos Gardening’, and according to social media influencers, it’s the laid-back way to grow just about anything.
It was news to me.
You begin by gathering up old, leftover seed packets and mix them all together. Vegetables, perennials, annuals, wildflower mixes; it doesn’t matter. Toss those seeds thickly but randomly over a bare patch of ground and keep the soil moist until the seeds germinate. Soon you’ll have a colorful and bountiful flowering garden to enjoy. No planting in rows, no rigid rules, and best of all, no stress.
My first impression was that chaos gardening sounded a lot like the ‘Eat All You Want and Still Lose Twenty Pounds in One Week Diet’, but I was intrigued.
The prestigious Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show in London is well-known for 113 years of highly manicured show gardens that take a year to plan and include thousands of dollars worth of plants. It turns out that in the 2023 show; a wild, self-seeding, and native meadow-style garden demonstrating sustainability and biodiversity was on display. Featuring weeds, leaf litter, and insect homes, designer Tom Massey won an award.
From Chelsea, it looks like the chaos gardening trend landed at Tiktok. Nearly 25,000 #chaosgardening posts testify how gardeners transformed barren patches of dirt and weeds into stunning arrays of beautiful flowers.
Chaos gardening may be a new viral trend, but it has its roots in the cottage gardens of the Middle Ages. Gardens packed with herbs, flowers, and vegetables grown shoulder to shoulder and covering every inch of soil with not a single seed wasted were essential for providing the food and medicine necessary for a household to survive.
Tiktok is a great place to go for energy and inspiration, but its format often relies on unverified advice. University Extensions provide peer reviewed and science based information and field trials, and are the place to go for validating a “hack” before trying it.
Does chaos gardening really work? Like for so many things in life, the answer is “sometimes.”
Deryn Davidson is the Sustainable Landscape Specialist for Colorado State University Extension, and was cited in the New York Times story. She moderated a webinar in late 2025 featuring several Colorado State University Extension horticulture experts who had personal experience with chaos gardening. While being positive and enthusiastic, the panel points out some chaos gardening negatives that were left out in many of those highly edited Tiktok videos.
Despite the easy ‘set it and forget it and anything goes’ vibe, chaos gardens still require care. Watering, weeding, and eventually cutting back or removing spent annuals are all part of the cycle.
Here are a few more of the panel’s suggestions.
Your mix of seeds should be sowed on soil that has been worked just a bit to loosen it enough to welcome them. Simply sowing seeds on unworked soil ensures that they will be eaten by critters, blown away in the wind, or simply never germinate.
That brings us to this next point, an undisputed fact of gardening life. Each time you disturb the soil, you bring to the surface what could be a vast seed bank of weed seeds that will thrive in the newly found sunshine. Weeds will always win and you can count on it, out-competing the seeds of the more desirable species you just sowed. If you don’t control the weeds before you plant any type of garden, and not just a chaos garden, the weeds will control and defeat you.
If your mix contains seeds of native plants, sowing in the late fall will ensure a period of cold stratification and maximum germination success in the spring.
If your seed mix includes shade-loving plants and your garden is in full-sun, or you sow drought tolerant plants into boggy soil, they will struggle.
Some wildflower seed mixes may contain non-native species that can spread beyond your garden and become invasive.
Not everyone who wants to garden has a wheel barrow and a shed full of gardening tools. If a novice gardener tries this relatively easier style of gardening, they may be inspired to try growing their own food next. If their chaos garden brings in the bees, maybe they’ll plant a garden just for pollinators. If native plants in the mix thrive, why not try more native varieties?
Even if you’re an experienced gardener, you just might be tempted to try something different.
Learn more about Chaos Gardening from the Colorado State University Extension webinar.