What do I do?
I write and make videos about my gardening journey so that other people can make the most of their gardens.
On my TikTok channel, Rhiannon’s Garden, I share informal, entertaining educational content about growing food and flowers, garden design, and tips to make growing easier. I grow everything at home in my back garden; my content sits happily in the Home and Lifestyle sectors. TikTok is, in my view, the best social media platform for gardeners as it fosters such friendly engagement, and has a big focus on value for the viewer. It functions like a world of sorts with its own languages, jokes, and subcultures.
On my website, I share longer-form content: evocative personal gardening stories like this one, alongside simple gardening articles to help people figure out what they’d like to grow and how to grow it. My website is about humans connecting with their gardens, and is a place where beginners can escape judgement and learn about growing in a safe space. My articles are designed to be accessible; they assume no prior gardening knowledge, so there’s no bar to entry.
My audience
Since I started my TikTok channel in early 2023, it has grown to over 74,000 followers and 4 million views. Depending on the season, I currently average 30-40,000 views per week with an engagement rate of around 8%. My videos have a long shelf life as they are designed to rank in TikTok’s search engine; it isn’t unusual for my most popular video of the week to be something I posted months before.
My TikTok account has been featured in the Daily Mirror (here, here and here) and BNN Breaking.
My viewers are mostly female in the 18-35 age range, in the US, UK and Australia. They are learning to garden and crave a slower life with more time spent in beautiful outdoor spaces. They love quintessential English garden design: dreamy, romantic drifts of flowers amid productive vegetable patches, walls clad in fragrant wisteria, and squirrels squabbling with sparrows at the bird table. I’m quite proud that I’ve managed to blend my polytunnel into this aesthetic!
I’m keen to expand on what “cottage garden” means to modern gardeners. So many of us love the style, but so few of us live in cottages. My current project is a cottage-style outdoor office for working at home:
I’m also on Instagram as Rhiannon’s Garden. I tend to share lots of stories – bits of gardening jobs, exciting finds, what I’m cooking with my harvests, and what Caspar cat is getting up to. Here, I have a cosy 1000 followers and some wonderful gardening friends.
Contact
You can contact me by email at rhiannon.sm.gardens@gmail.com.