Images and text in this page document the keynote discussion I held with Participants in the 2026 AHS Youth Gardening Symposium, held in Pasadena, CA, in July. The images are slides used during the conversation, though the text is background notes, not a direct transcription of what was said.
Slide 1: Social Constructivism. I agreed to this presentation enthusiastically because talking with people who work with young people in gardening has always been a treat. But I soon held pangs of regret, in that my confidence as a speaker is normally founded on believing I would be the most informed person in the room on the topic at hand. But here I am presenting to people who likely have more experience working with children and young people. To top that, I most certainly am preaching to the choir. Then it dawned on me that among my many heroes and mentors is Jean Piaget; I am a Constructivist. You are individuals with your own framework of understanding; our discussion will bring different meaning to each person in the room. That is like Gardening, which impacts so many aspects of our lives. We do not worry about some single meaning. Given that scenario and our individual schemas, I decided to give a brief roll call of my gardening mentors, walking you through some of my own life experience in gardening and plant study, with the goal of provoking you to reflect on your life experience, in Piaget’s language, to assimilate, accommodate, and equilibrate your experiences over the course of this Symposium, probing your own internalized source of inspiration.
Slide 2: Meaning Making: We all come at this project from differing viewpoints and backgrounds. Kidsgardening has a nice poster you can purchase that turns the nearly countless connections between gardening and other aspects of life into a maze. It’s a constructivist reminder that any students we work with will come to gardening from a different place such that every activity or exposure has a unique impact. It also reminds us of the wide ranging interests and skills gardening invokes, allowing practically any student some way to engage while bringing new understanding to their lives and the meaning they make of their worlds.
Slide 3: Other presenters have reflected on the many lessons that come from gardening. I’ve charted those that come to mind in the above list, experiences that will be as true and beneficial to future gardeners as they have been for people in the past.
Slide 4: Reflecting on my own experience and the people who taught and encouraged me, it seems I came to gardening early in life, here grubbing in the soil helping a man who worked with my father. I’m thinking we were digging earthworms for a fishing trip, an activity that preceded any day of fishing in a time before jelly worms (which were invented and manufactured in my hometown by Thomas Mann).
Slide 5: I would be among the 4th generation of our family to live in Eufaula, a small, quietly segregated South Alabama town along the Chattahoochee River in the deep sands of the lower Coastal Plain. It was a time and place where ghosts materialize as cool spots along paths on warm summer evenings, where I knew that Robert E. Lee’s horse was named Traveller, and when almost any conversation would be shaded by dismal echoes of the Great Depression and WW II. All was not somber; a core memory for me was the walk to school, marked by a giant Oak tree garrisoned by its own wrought iron fence, a rare but meaningful “Tree that Owns Itself,” a deed-holding Oak with its own plot.
Slide 6: By the time I was in middle school, we had moved to an older and larger wooden home on Barbour Street, with a porch suited mainly for gossip, shelling peas, and drinking sweet tea. Though my father was a plumber and not a gardener at all, I recall the year he planted tomatoes along the short entry walk in order to annoy some neighbors, a plot that fell victim to a team of tomato hornworms, which I collected and incarcerated in a terrarium, only to have them vanish by the next day. Of course, they bored into the soil, pupated, and emerged a while later as large sphingid moths macerating themselves against the the walls of their glass prison.
Slide 7: The real gardeners in our family were my Mother and Grandmother, who insisted that in our new, larger lot we would have a meaningful plot, an extensive vegetable that fed the family for 30 years, following the mantra “if you can’t feed yourself, you’ll starve.”
Slide 8: But gardening mentors were not just at home. In a small town in the 50s, children were free to roam. Yards were seldom separated by fences or hedges, and they were populated with gardeners going about their chores. People were about, in their gardens and on their porches. This was life before air conditioning, and a time when our black ’n white television sets would conjure only two static-ridden channels. So I roamed the town and knew everyone, especially anyone with a garden or a porch full of interesting plants, all of whom had something to tell or show me. One neighbor, Mrs. Fain, kept what was my dream garden, an acre sloping down to a stream, high canopied by pines and oaks shading pine-straw carpeted paths lined with Liriope. Giving access to a shrubbery of selected camellias and azaleas, the garden held a small luxury, an underplanting of strawberries, not enough for a harvest, but adequate to rinse and share as we would walk and talk our way through the landscape. I hope she enjoyed telling me about gardening as much as I appreciated the knowledge and attention. Gardeners love to share, ideas, experiences, time, and even the occasional cutting or seed.
Slide 9: Other mentoring would be single encounters, like the time, as a young teen, I wrote to the famous Atlanta daylily hybridizer Mrs. Lester and wrangled an invitation to visit – a 120 mile trip that Mother would drive so we could spend a couple of hours with Mary Lester in her garden, learning about how she hybridized and selected so many famous clones, and returning with a few precious very modern introductions. Somewhere, I still have the postcard she sent me. It’s meaningful when gardeners take time to encourage young people. And there is often the bonus of a few precious plants.
Slide 10: There were virtual mentors also, people I would never meet but whose writings and art would shape my thoughts. Life was rich with tomes like Rockwell’s 10,000 Garden Questions Answered and even illustrated children’s books, like The Plant Sitter, which I perused time and again at the local Carnegie Library. Later there would be researchers whose work informed and refined my thoughts, speaking directly to my own interests. Those meaningful bonds with creators you’ll never meet fill a psychological type that I learned from AI (the best thesaurus ever) might be termed moledro – “a feeling of deep, resonant connection with an author or artist you will never meet. It describes the intimate, almost sacred experience of reading or viewing the work of a creator who lived long ago, yet perfectly articulates your own soul and personal experiences .” For a small town boy those virtual ties were liberating. Expertise was not limited to books and occasional television shows, among the most sensational out of town guests in my life were the enticing seed catalogs I’d order from advertisements in Flower & Garden magazine. For the cost of a stamp I could pour over pictures and descriptions that marketed the impossible.
Slide 11: Sources of inspiration have changed, but what hasn’t changed is the reality there are still kids around who are natively interested in plants. In the slide above you’ll see Vinny’s 5th posting, from two years ago.
Slide 12: And here he is in a recent post, growing up fast. Vinny is the quintessential gardening self-starter, thriving from encounters with plant mentors at every level, quickly becoming an expert gardener. But I’ve come to imagine this as an exception.
Slide 13: Many, perhaps most people are indifferent to plants and gardening. Here’s a real estate agent who explains his realization. It’s just not for everyone, I believe it isn’t in his DNA.
Slide 14: That observation has led to my informal, anecdotal way to categorize potential audiences. Graphs give an aura of plausibility to a claim, so please do not take this summary as supported by any research. It’s simply my way of describing how I’ve come to imagine the public interest in gardening. There are a few people in almost any population who are destined to pursue study or a career in some green industry, farming, arboriculture, nursery work, gardening. The number is probably much smaller than a percentage assumed from the graph. There are people who are simply natural gardeners, nurturers for whom it all is so logical. They get it, the love of gardening. There are outdoors types who are hikers, birders, cattlemen, for whom just being outdoors is the best thing. Then there are the students, people who do what is expected because that’s what they do. Finally, the greatest percentage of our public is the greatest worry or challenge. How to engage people for whom gardening is of little interest?
Slide 15: Back to the Kidsgardening maze, which reminds us there are many gardening-related tracks that might have brought more relevancy to someone who pedals real estate, from construction to home design, to creating built environments that elevate quality of life. Those wide-flung opportunities were still open to me as I left home in Eufaula and entered undergraduate study at Auburn.
Slide 16: As the sole botany major in Auburn’s 1968 Freshman class I was a bit spoiled – Botany majors were treated about the same as Grad students, invited to staff retreats and professors’ homes. The staff was clearly delighted to have any undergrads studying plants. I registered for every course taught in the department and reveled in the field-trip based format that was standard. Looking at the Botany program today, I see core sciences distanced from Agriculture, set in a different context. Careers suggested do not include Horticultural or Agricultural orientations, even though those programs are still strong, and many are in the same buildings with Biological Sciences.
Slide 17: Had I entered Auburn today, it seems the Horticulture program would have been more appropriate to my interests. Glad I went through botanical science when it was still linked to applied interests in the School of Agriculture, when researchers still got their hands dirty.
Slide 18: Having been in AFROTC (Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps) over my four years at Auburn, I was enlisted as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Air Force immediately after graduation. Dr. Marshall, Auburn’s Mycologist, had been in the military during WWII, serving as a pathologist inspecting shipments to Liberia that might bring a Hevea (rubber tree) disease (SALB, South American Leaf Blight) to Africa, which was the major supplier for for rubber because of Firestone’s ownership of major Hevea plantations in Liberia. When I discussed military enlistment and the very few positions for which I might be “qualified” with him, Marshall cautioned me to enter with no expectations. I took his counsel to heart, and looking over the possibilities ahead added Nutrition courses to my schedule. That proved prescient, as I entered the Air Force in the role of Food Services Officer for a base in Northern Indiana, a role for which I received zero training. My on-the-job experience proved engaging, making my stint a time of learning to organized a kitchen, manage a staff, process extensive paperwork, and function within a massive bureaucracy – all useful skills.
Slide 19: Leaving the Air Force I entered Vanderbilt University, which agreed to honor a scholarship that had been offered years earlier. There I worked with Ben Channel, who had also been John Freeman’s major professor, as well as Robert Kral, a specialist in many plant groups, most particularly sedges. I also was mentored by the botanical gardens staff at Cheekwood, where I helped with tropical plants, particularly orchids and bromeliads. During my time at Vanderbilt, I was allowed to take a 1-year leave of absence to collect plants for the Missouri Botanical Garden Flora of Panama project (learning Spanish on the road), after which I completed my research on Yellow-fringed Orchids in the Southeast Coastal Plain.
Slide 20: Entering the botany PhD program at The University of Texas, Austin, I was allowed to continue orchid study, this time working on a tropical group, which led to a year-long Fulbright studying in Colombia. Once again I was fortunate to work with a number of remarkable researchers, including a truly impressive cadre of grad students from around the world. I was certainly neither the most gifted nor brilliant, but was positioned to learn from many who were.
Slide 21: Leaving UT I interviewed for a position at The Huntington, curiously the only job interview I’ve ever had. Working as Assistant Director for Myron Kimnach, I was appointed Director after his retirement. Over the course of 35 years at The Huntington I worked with countless people who mentored me on every aspect of gardening, planning, managing, funding, and promoting the Gardens. In fact, life was constant encounter, feedback, guidance, discussion, negotiation, and conciliation. Turns out Gardening is all about working with and learning from others, truly a social skill.
Slide 22: Moledro on steroids…. Life isn’t simply about contemporary issues; the Huntington had a style and a history. Though he had died in 1927, the spirit of Henry Huntington pervaded our efforts as we operated within the structural framework and with the collections and indenture he had bequeathed to the institution. Planning future changes, I’d find myself wondering how Huntington himself might have decided what to do. Certainly I could imagine walking into his office and saying, “Boss, I’m ready to move ahead. What’s the budget?”
Slide 23: The person who actually played that role was William Hertrich, who served as Huntington foreman and Ranch manager from 1905 through semi-retirement in 1948, but maintaining oversight and living on the property until his death in 1966. It was Hertrich who had hired Myron Kimnach, and Myron who hired me. The Gardens were designed and built by those two amazing dynamos, one a land developer, the other a landscaper and horticulturist. Everything the staff and I would achieve later was built in the context of what they and their staff had accomplished over eight decades. Usefully, Hertrich wrote and The Huntington published a significant history of his time working with Huntington and later, carrying on once the institution was activated after the Founder’s death. In this slide you see David MacLaren and I standing in Hertrich’s footsteps in the entry to the Japanese Garden he created for Huntington in 1912, the second oldest public Japanese Garden in the US.
Slide 24: The next slide gives a montage of just a few of hundreds of people who influenced my work and that of staff and volunteers over three and a half decades at the Gardens. Myron is in the solo portrait to the left, and then, seated to the left of Myron we see Loran Whitelock (who compiled a major collection of living cycads, wrote the most comprehensive treatment, and bequeathed his plants and estate to the Gardens), and Elmer Lorenz, long term volunteer and plantsman extraordinaire. Below is a photo of Fred Brandt standing with Myron. Fred was my Superintendent and significant mentor over three decades, a man whose knowledge, skills, and capacity for work were matched only by his dislike of paperwork.
Slide 25: In this collection of images, I include one in the upper left of Laurie Sowd (left) standing beside June Li with one of the Chinese job superintendents. Laurie was gifted in project management; June is a Chinese art historian who we came to trust in all manners of aesthetic decisions regarding the Chinese Garden. A succession of gifted and dedicated supervisors from the Suzhou Construction firm brought reality and life to the garden, while helping us to understand so much about China’s cultural aesthetics. They were among scores of designers and historians and hundreds of workers who collaborated to build Liu Fang Yuan, the Huntington Chinese Garden. Everything about that garden required new learning, from design to engineering to materials and construction to planting and on-going horticultural care. It was a nearly overwhelming learning experience, one that revealed To the right is bonsai artist Ben Oki, a native-born American living in Hiroshima during WWII, who taught me much about Japanese-style pruning and about life in general. Below is Nakamura, a Japanese national treasure when it came to traditional architecture. The bond we formed was monumental, as I came to understand and trust his judgement in every aspect of Japanese building and gardening design. It has been a phenomenal life-changing experience to work with people of this caliber
Slide 26: When we began planning the Bing Children’s Garden, we sought ideas and advice from many sources. The freshest ideas concerning garden spaces for children were evident in Michigan’s newly-acclaimed 4-H Children’s Garden, conceived by Jane Taylor. Jane agreed to visit The Huntington for several days, consulting with us regarding the inspiration behind her garden, thoughts that (in 2005) would be paralleled by extensive documentation in Richard Louv’s significant publication Last Child in the Woods. We had visited Jane at her garden, where I made extensive observations of what was different, what seemed to work, and what might be just right for Huntington. On her visit to The Huntington, Jane was interested in whimsical themes that might relate to Library collections (such as Peter Rabbit), and many of here working ideas became part of the garden, such as some kind of overlook, water features, sound, spaces for individuals as well as groups. Most importantly, her enthusiasm and barrier-breaking approach to a children’s garden was inspiration for us.
Slide 27: In the end, we based the Children’s Garden on a theme common to various aspects of the Gardens, most particularly a concept used in the Reading Plants tour. Speaking to plant adaptations, the tour suggested that if you understood some things about how habitats and limiting resources play out in the physical appearances of plants, you could “read” or predict something about the plants origin. (It also was a nice play on words related to the importance of libraries and published information on plants.) Students learned that plants thrive on four principle “elements” – Soil, Air, Sunlight, and Water (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), which sometimes is abbreviated as SWAN (sun, water, air, nutrients) or LAWN (light, air, water, nutrients).
Slide 28: Major biomes can be examined based on what resources might be limiting; thus plant adaptations can be studied as a response to the abundance or limitation of various necessary resources. Docents would walk students through the Desert Garden, where plants exhibit adaptation to low water availability, the Jungle Garden, where water was abundant, but light and nutrients could be limited, and the Lily Ponds, where plants in mud and water cope with limited availability of air. The importance of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water inspired the basic thematic areas in the Children’s Garden, with various wonderful transitions.
Slide 28: In the slide above, Helen Bing joins a group checking out the fog grotto (where children can see water droplets moving in the Air) soon after opening. Helen was particularly fond of the whimsical aspects of the garden, such as topiary and charming structures; Peter Bing was impressed by the scientific underpinnings. The photo to the right shows Elliot Meyerowitz (CalTech) walking through the Children’s Garden construction site with artist Ned Kahn who proposed, prototyped, and created the major interpretive elements to meet our science theme. Shortly after this project, Ed received a MacArthur Fellowship for his brilliant approaches to kinetic sculpture.
Slide 29: Soon after the Children’s Garden opened, we were excited to see some of our convictions well-discussed in Louv’s remarkable compilation of studies and thoughts.
Slide 31: Adjacent to the Children’s Garden and Teaching Greenhouse, with assistance from Annenberg Foundation, we established an experimental and demonstration garden, paired with development of the Brody Potager, both intended to address families and the interests of home gardeners. Once again we found partners and mentors in the Pasadena USD, people who were driven to create a Farm to Table program internal to the school district.
Side 32: In the realm of mentors whose research writings and thoughts contributed to development of displays, collections, and landscapes, the works of people such as Douglas Tallamay and Peter Raven remind us that we are all mentored and influenced by environmentalists and scientists such as these two, but also in more ancient works. Recall The Huntington Library collections hold all five hand-written manuscript copies of Thoreau’s Walden
Slide 33: Inspiration is not limited to the world of researchers and writers. Huntington acquisition of Church’s Chimborazo gave impetus to many programs and collaborations that involved the Conservatory. Simply studying the natural history behind this important landscape brought new thoughts as to how we might interpret the living collections.
Slide 34: Plants and Photosynthesis, the colors of the rainbow, the importance of being green, all worked their way into many displays and programs. TikTok creators have resurrected some ancient and enthralling videos – here we listen to Richard Feynman on photosynthesis.
Slide 35: All of this to remind us that mentors are more the rule than the exception for gardeners. That we each are mentors, and even the writings, recollections, and creative art of people long gone are sources of knowledge and inspiration – which is mentorship at its most effective. This leads us to the discussion of Social Media, and how educators and youth gardening advocates might curate a platform like TikTok to take advantage of mentorship moments provided by the many creators we encounter today, including ways for you to generate your own inspirational and instructive posts.
Slide 36: Introducing Social Media. The slide shows the BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine feeds for TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Note their greatest strength and effort have relate to Instagram, but all three are enormous. The potential audience for outreach is astonishing.
Slide 37: In my efforts to understand how gardeners (and green industry people) use TikTok to communicate, I’ve visited around 4,000 channels, and have constructed an index to over 2500 of those. This has give me the opportunity to gain some sense of what kinds of information creators have been posting to TikTok, what purposes drive their postings, and where trends are moving at the moment.
Slide 38: Here you see a recent screenshot of @botanyincontext, my public channel. I’m using this to explain some aspects of TikTok. You can see on this page that my account follows 9400 other accounts, that I have 22.3K followers, and that my various posts have garnered 463.8K likes over the past five years. Below that you see the most recent posts at the time I made this screenshot (around 3 June 2026), each indicating how many people had viewed that particular post. If you scroll down, you’ll see (in chronological order) all of the clips I have posted.
Slide 39: The slide above shows a few cells of a spreadsheet I maintain of every TikTok I post, as well as the notes I included with the post. To the right is a permalink to that particular TikTok. Note that as of 2 July 2026, when I updated the spreadsheet, I had posted 4,233 clips since first beginning this project in May, 2021, slightly more than five years ago.
Slide 40: Above you see my index page when I filter by most views. Note my only viral clip shows 1.7 million views for a video I made in Huatulco of Brenda, showing us her various mezcal infusions. The second most is an explanation as to how I peel garlic. The third was a striking red azalea in a Philadelphia landscape, followed by a window box planting in Alexandria, VA, and then a video clip of Nathaniel, “grunting” for worms in Apalachicola National Forest.
Slide 41: In this slide, I played a brief section of the video clip with Brenda, as demonstration
Slide 42: The Technicalities & Complications list gives a rundown of issues worth understanding before creating a TikTok account. Further explanation of each point is provided on my website where I explain aspects of TikTok for gardeners, see: https://botanyincontext.com/the-green-side-of-tiktok/
Slide 43: The slide introduces the concept of a S.W.O.T. analysis of TikTok, which follows.
Slide 44: The SWOT is my own fabrication, neither reviewed nor edited by others. It’s really a discussion document that allows me to point out particularly interesting advantageous and detrimental aspects of TikTok as a platform.
Slide 45: The next many slides are examples of people who have posted on Gardening topics. Kevin Espiritu stands out a very successful creator, one who has turned his social media into a major business.
Slide 46: An example of a recent EpicGardening post
Slide 47: Another example of an Epic Gardening post, this one about using kitchen scraps for propagation
Slide 48: A statement by another creator explaining Kevin’s rise.
Slide 49: Showcasing a spectacular content account, @elapsefilm, which posts timelapse videos of plant development. The example here is strawberry, from flower to mature fruit.
Slide 50: TikTok can be a source for some fun ideas. Here @gardenary shows how to make and use a Squash Horn.
Slide 51: Just before the above slide we enjoyed the @gardenary video on Zucchini Horns. But here we find the same creator offering advice I would not support.
Slide 52: Social Media and Streaming services lower the inertial barrier for homespun personalities to reach star status. Meet Garden Marcus, who has parleyed his efforts to talk with children about plants into quite a well-received platform. Marcus, logically, doesn’t allow downloads of his videos, but here is another creator giving feedback.
Slide 53: Among communities well-represented on TikTok we find Master Gardeners, Homesteaders, Homeschooling parents…
Slide 54: Newbie Gardeners, Black and Latino home gardeners, as well as almost any people who see TikTok as an opportunity to reach larger audiences for sales, as seen in the sidebar.
Slide 55: TikTok is also showing greater representation of plant specialty groups, which historically have used Facebook for networking.
Slide 56: Proven Winners and many nurseries and seed suppliers have strong presence, amplified by other creators.
Slide 57: Botanical Gardens have been a bit slow to capitalize on TikTok, as have governmental entities, almost certainly due to the politicized bans that were instituted over the past few years.
Slide 58: This brings us to how you and I might use TikTok to connect, inform, and inspire (note my use of AI to decide on “connect”…. I had written “communicate, inform, and inspire”, which wasn’t parallel, so I queried AI for a different wording, and AI suggested “connect, inform, and inspire” would be solid).
Slide 59: Sizing up issues on all sides of the equation, I’ve concocted a S.W.O.T for the use of TikTok (or other platforms) in youth gardening programs. One could treat solely as a video clip resource from other creators, to be viewed but not augmented. It could be totally didactic, posting informative techniques and instruction. TikTok might function like a newsletter or on-going journal of activities in a working garden. It might be considered a collection of memories for families to view and even download. One might even consider opening the comments section for dialogue. The brief analysis highlights possibilities at differing ends of the spectrum.
Slide 60: Before instituting the most basic use of social media, I believe you’ll want to have Rules in place that govern engagement and set limits for potentially bad or awkward players. The slide above lists some suggested requests.
Link to this Page: https://botanyincontext.com/gardening-for-young-people-tiktok-version/