11 May What’s the Story, Morning Glory? 7 Reasons to Snapchat Your Garden

For all the planning it involves, gardening is filled with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments. Like short-lived blossoms and butterfly fly-bys. A Venus flytrap chomping on a housefly. Sometimes you just want to gush off the cuff about the taste of a fresh-grown radish to whoever happens to be listening.

Which is our very navel-gazing way of saying: Join us on Snapchat! It was on this app that we recently shared, live from our garden, video footage from a beer tasting we hosted at home. (Belgians and blindfolds were involved.) Other posts have included shots of our blooming epiphyllum wall and Ryan feeding our carnivore corner. Plus so much more…

Find us at ‘thehorticult’ for spontaneous stories that bloom bright then vanish (or so we’re told) after 24 hours. We’d also love to find more gardeners on Snapchat, so let us know where to find you! Here are our 7 Reasons to Snapchat Your Garden:

1. Less pressure. By contrast, Instagram is where we go for dreamy, illuminating (and often curated-feeling) eye candy. Snapchat, on the other hand, presses you to post the funny/imperfect/compellingly chaotic scene in front of you without the pressure of it being on Your Permanent Internet Record. Limited filter options prevent you from slipping down a rabbit hole—while your asters wilt away.

2. Feel free to get goofier. Expanding on Reason #1, this is your chance to wear a fern on your head, blurt out a plant pun, and send it to friends…or to the world.

(The leather swatter is used to stun the flies before feeding them to the fly traps!)

3. You can give quick tutorials. If you’re feeling moved to share a 10-second note about your preferred pruning technique (which might get lost on YouTube), Snapchat is your place and your platform.

4. You can draw, doodle and write…right on your plant photos. Turn an iceberg rose bush into a Joseph’s coat rose bush.

5. Efficiency. You can catch up with friends and fascinating strangers in the noisy, random, back-to-back montages in the Stories section. On your end, you can collage together scenes from a park visit or a garden tour so it actually feels like a mini documentary of moving and still images.

6. It kind of forces you to pronounce stuff right. If you’re shooting a video of your shade garden of dracaenas, calatheas, and caladiums, this is your opportunity to do the pronunciation fact-checking you might have been putting off. So if we pronounce something wrong, send us a chat!

7. The selfie filters. The selfie filters. Who can resist the genius of an animated puppy face attached to your actual face? You’ll look even more like a garden sage when you give yourself a flower crown.

—TH