Photos by Dylan Wells
LOS ANGELES — From her front yard in Mid-Wilshire, Carmen Perr — known online as Carmen in the Garden — cultivated an audience of more than 1.5 million followers by sharing her garden-to-table recipes, crops of cucamelons, and baskets of produce she gifts her in-laws.
Across the country in suburban Howard County, Maryland, Christen McCoy — who posts under the handle @verygoodgardening — built an audience of more than 2 million followers through ASMR-like “harvest time” videos as she forages potatoes and plucks strawberries on her property.
Both garden creators are also hauling in brand partnerships and growing revenue. I visited the gardens of Perr and McCoy, two of the top creators in the space, to learn more about how creators have replaced traditional gardening media.
Substack last month launched a Home & Garden category after identifying momentum in the vertical, according to Carrie Marks, the company’s head of lifestyle partnerships. Originally, the garden space was dominated by expert gatekeepers in the gardening departments of magazines like Southern Living, Martha Stewart and Better Homes and Gardens, explained Katie Dubow, the president of Garden Media Group, a PR and marketing firm that represents plant companies. That changed around 15 years ago when bloggers interrupted the scene and there was a rush to send samples to a broader group of hundreds of social media users.
“These creators have really made gardening more accessible,” she said, noting many of the top influencers in the space started gardening as a hobby. At first, “the creators were on this trajectory of kind of turning back to the glossies, just showing this unattainable perfection,” Dubow said. Now, the “creators you see that really take off are the ones that do show a little bit of the gritty.”
On opposite coasts, Perr and McCoy both started gardening as a way to help relieve stress and anxiety. Perr’s content went viral in early 2023, after challenging herself to see what she could cook using only ingredients from her garden. She prepared grilled cabbage and carrots, and replicated the format after identifying that people wanted approachable, attainable tutorials and developed another signature series of the harvest baskets.
McCoy, meanwhile, started on Instagram and moved her attention to TikTok in early 2022 and found she got more engagement when she was the focus of the video. Her first video to blow up with over a million views was a “really big harvest,” a format she said is now the anchor of her channels and that she physically changed her garden to produce more of.
“I started to change the way that I garden so that I could get those big harvests more often and be able to have more content to film,” McCoy said. “We started building more beds because of that too, just to have more space to grow things, growing things that are turning over more,” like squash and beans, as well as fan favorite crops like strawberries.
Both have navigated unexpectedly becoming recognized for their content and viewers wanting to visit their gardens in real life. Both started gardening around full-time jobs, editing and posting late at night. Perr was a real estate investment analyst, while McCoy is an elementary school music teacher.
Perr quit her job a year in, after it grew to the point of being “a viable business.” She said she brings her prior business experience into how she has pursued partnerships and built her accounts and tries to be “omnipresent across platforms.” She got her first brand deal six months into her account, and did cold outreach by pitching brands she identified in her house that she used already and offering to make a video together. Now, her main partnerships are a mix of gardening, cooking, lifestyle and “living seasonally,” as well as some beauty brands with minimal ingredients, and even some tech companies, observing that “gardening really does sit over food, wellness, sustainability.” She’s produced her own wine, and said she’d love to collaborate on an olive oil or spice mix.
McCoy said she is interested in pursuing content full time and that the monetization has helped her family as “two teachers that are living in a very expensive area” to not have to live “paycheck to paycheck anymore.” But, she said, “we have three kids and a mortgage, and so it has to be the right timing, and I have to be more successful than I am right now. … I would have to be much more comfortable in the income that I'm making right now,” later adding that her YouTube has not taken off as much as she would like. She’s partnered with tool companies and garden brands and in the apparel space, as well as having her own merch.
“There definitely is more money in other spaces and more opportunities, especially because I don’t think people or brands can see how they fit into what I do,” McCoy said.
Dubrow said that the garden space can be challenging because many of the traditional companies in the industry still prioritize going through retailers, they lack affiliate sales programs and prefer people buy plants in real life as opposed to having to ship them in the mail, or they are run by older owners less familiar with creators.
Her firm works with 50 to 100 creators a year with rates ranging from $500 to $25,000 for year-long partnerships. The lack of some creators’ gardening expertise helps with accessibility, but can also be a challenge for brands, she noted. She cited a campaign she ran for a brand around lilies, for which a creator posted a video about calla lilies instead: “If you were a horticulturist, or if you were a gardener … you would understand the difference between Asiatic and Oriental and calla lilies, they're totally different plants.”
“The time for conversion is much longer than a lipstick,” she added of the obstacles for creators making money in the plant space. “Our customer life cycle is probably more like three months.” But the strength of the visual medium, like a harvest basket of produce or freshly cut flowers, “nothing compares to that, except maybe a shopping haul.”
Beyond the timeline to convert viewers, the timing requirements of gardening are a challenge for creators in the space. On the East Coast, the weather can be an issue.
“Something that I'm always reconciling is like a tomato takes months to grow, right? It takes as little as 30 seconds to film a short form video,” Perr said. In Maryland, McCoy said she supplements winter crops with old videos in order to keep the account active, given how seasonal the activity is.
“A lot of creators are able to make content whenever they want to, however, I have to plan months in advance … if I would like peppers to make pepper jelly, so that I can give them away at Christmas, then I have to be able to harvest those, probably around October, which means that I have to grow them all summer long, and I've got to start them as seeds in February,” McCoy said. “That's a 10-month commitment that I've got to figure out.”
This story is part of Verified, a newsletter that is published by Washington Post Creator, a team outside The Washington Post’s newsroom that is focused on the creator economy and content partnerships with independent creators. Learn more about Washington Post Creator.
