Is Gardening the New Reading?

Unconquered Territory

Some people enjoy hobbies long before they come into vogue and continue to enjoy them long after the sheen has gone off them. In short, they aren’t trends for these hobbyists Reading and gardening are two respectable hobbies, they can both be long term hobbies and you don’t have to eschew one to enjoy the other. You may feel as if I am stating the obvious, but I’m just laying the foundation for what I’m about to say; gardening is the new reading.

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Several years ago, perhaps spurned by, in no order, BookTok, the Pandemic and a people documenting and positioning themselves as one who reads, as well as the rise of celebrity and content creator book clubs, it seemed that everyone was reading all the time. I’m sure the increase in smut helped too actually. And not only what they are reading, they were sharing what they were reading, recommending what people should read and posting beautifully composed pictures of books next to matcha lattes or poking out of designer bags. Off the top of my head, I can think of Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club, Dua Lipa’s, The Shameless book club and then there is everyone you know who started a book club too.

One of the influencer’s who I felt began including much more book content in her vlogs was UK based content creator Brittany Bathgate. Simply searching Brittany Bathgate books on YouTube and presents you with at least 18 videos with ‘books’ in the title, and after that I stopped scrolling. Lizzie Hadfield, another UK content creator also has a lot of book content in her vlogs and now has a book club called Buffy’s (after the vampire slayer) which is both an offline event as well as a Substack. You are encouraged to follow Hadfield on Instagram to find out when and where the events are taking place as well as which book will be featured. Both content creators started off in the fashion and beauty space and will often delve into homewares. The books have become a part of what to expect but not how they started – and this feels like a key point, because to me, whenever something starts to appear in the vlogs I watch, it feels like it is about to hit the mainstream and be commodified by many people who perhaps wouldn’t have participated in this activity before. For example, Brittany’s last two vlogs have featured gardening. Allana Davidson often provides a garden update in her content, ditto Anna Newton of The Anna Edit.

You might be saying, Natasha, people like to garden, and people like to read. Yes, of course they do, but when people start including very sedentary somewhat private hobbies in a commodified space, well it feels different. I understand many of these people now live in spaces where they have a garden whereas previously, they may have lived in an apartment and not had to consider the space outside their property, or perhaps longed for a lawn to mow.

Gardening is at once a leisurely pursuit and one which is a lot of work. What kind of gardening work you’re doing and whether it is your garden you are taking care of, also colours the social positioning of you as a gardener. In the context of influencers gardening, it is a satisfying pastime that allows them to fill vlog minutes both sporadically and in a story arc kind of way, the garden has become a new location and context in which we can see them create, produce and purchase; whilst encouraging us to do so also. Both reading and gardening seem can be perceived as low energy hobbies, mainly due to the lack of technology, yet books and gardening like ‘no makeup makeup’ can be both, as previously mentioned, hard work and also really expensive. When hobbies go mainstream there is also a whole lot of accoutrements which suggest there is a right (aesthetically pleasing) and wrong (normal) way to do them. We also know YouTube is wonderful at making hard things easy and then complicating them all over again.

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Interesting to think about when a lot of these content creators started it was in their bedrooms of their family homes before evolving to apartments, then houses and now the land outside of them. Perhaps the next lot of women we’ll see be sent to space will be a group of content creators.