The "grandma hobby" problem

“It must be nice to do something a little more relaxing” - the standard comment after discussing my career change from marketing to horticulture. It’s complex, nuanced even. Yes, it is mentally a lot more soothing than the constant pressure of the entire business to ‘make us go viral’ whilst never being able to switch off - but relaxing? I’m not sure.

Yes, the saunter around the work garden watering to ease in the morning, entirely relaxing. Pushing around lawn mower in the third heatwave of the year? Not relaxing. Weeding in the cracks of the driest brickwork with taproots that don’t want to budge? Not relaxing. The list could go on.

Sometimes we confuse the lack of stress with a lack of real effort. Like if the job is not stressful, it surely is not hard. Work can be joyful, peaceful even and still be hard all at the same time. The difference being, hard isn’t always bad. Hard can make you feel a sense of pride once complete, stress? Not so much.

We all have our irks, things that make our eye twitch and our jaws clench. Gardening being dubbed a grandma hobby? That’s certainly an irk of mine.

There’s so much to unpick from this trending term, used to sell dresses1 with pockets and being used as the gold standard activity to help women slow down. At the crux of it, it seems kind - Grandmas typically are lovely and the act of gardening can be incredibly peaceful. So, why does the term not sit right?

The fundamental issue is that it completely diminishes the efforts of women in horticulture. It helps fuse the sense that women only do the whimsical, delicate things within the garden space. Picking vegetables, arranging them beautifully in a trug, floating around feeling grounded in their dress with pockets2.

All fine and well. Those things can definitely be a part of it, but the grandma hobby term takes away the true effort. The digging in the drizzly transitional months, the knowledge acquired to sow and raise a plant from seed, the safe and proper use of many tools, knowing when and how to prune different types of plants, the lifting, the carrying, the sweating, the tingling after being on your feet all day long.

As females in horticulture we’re suddenly blanketed under a false pretence that women’s work in the garden is fundamentally easier, and to a degree, trivial. Let us not forget that just over a century ago a director at Kew Gardens, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker wrote:

“Gardening as a hobby, when all the hard work is done by a man is a delightful thing for a woman. But as a career, it is an almost impossible thing.”3

Women fought hard to be taken seriously in horticulture, to push away the narrative that all we were fit for was the wonderful hobby of it. You would think 120 years on things would be more or less equal, but you would be mistaken to believe that.

Less of a credible source I know, but you only have to flick onto Pinterest to see images of Beth Chatto crouching with her incredible forward-thinking dry garden neatly pinned onto ‘Grandma Aesthetic’ boards. She did not simply construct a lovely idea, and the garden magically appear - she created that, she managed that and built an entire legacy from her ingenuity. A renowned gardener, a pioneer of horticulture. But thanks to the platform that never manages to credit anything properly - she’s been reduced to a grandma aesthetic.

With a quick glance towards our male counterparts, surely men that garden are told they’re doing a grandpa’s hobby too? I’ll let you answer that.

Hooker’s split between hobby and career doesn’t exist anymore, not because the attitude went away, but because language collapsed into one word. There’s no real distinction between the title gardener and hobby gardener. Yes, you could call yourself a horticulturalist, we probably should - but jobs are advertised as gardeners, and if you were to market your services, again, you’d probably lose people at horticulturalist.

Trivialising language aimed at the hobbyist lands directly onto the professional title too, we’re both gardeners here after all. The shared vocabulary means we cannot apply one phrase to the hobby without bringing the career down with it.

That’s not to say that amateur gardeners are at fault here, they’re not at all, even in the slightest. The term comes from a good place, a kind place. But nonetheless, whether women are working away in a heritage restoration project, a community garden or their own back garden - all of that work is worthy of recognition beyond its habitually calm attributes.

The work you commit to the garden is no walk in the park, there’s a combination of dedication, knowledge and physicality at play. You should be respected for it, beyond the lens of femininity.

After discussing this topic on my TikTok, I was met with an argument that perhaps I had a skewed view of grandmas (not something that was on my bingo card for 2026). The commenter assumed this was about how capable I think grandmas are. It isn’t. My argument is never about individual women, hobbyist or otherwise. When there’s no separate word to absorb the phrase, the trivialising has nowhere else to go but our shared title.

Fundamentally, the term was coined from a sense of needing to slow down, break away from the corporate machine - to enjoy things at a slower pace, the pace of someone retired. But every time we assign a sweet, harmless gendered term like this, we diminish women. The language creates a ceiling and traps women below it. Grandma hobby is one small sweet sounding piece in a wider problem of women’s value in horticulture.

Women in the Agriculture & Horticulture sector’s median hourly pay is 19.6%4 less than their male counterparts in the UK. That gap has plenty of causes, but a culture that can’t take women’s gardening seriously as work isn’t going to help. At this point can we really afford to trivialise women in the garden? (Or any work for that matter; gardening isn’t the only type of labour where women’s effort has been historically overlooked.)

Frankly, no. Gender split plays a role in every part of horticulture, I remember seeing Pollyanna Wilkinson speak about the clear lack of female garden designers showcasing on main avenue at RHS Chelsea Flower Show this year - even the women at the absolute top of their game still do not have the equality.

This year at Chelsea wasn’t without controversy after all, with Darren Hawkes designing The Lady Garden Foundation show garden. It was noted by Bunny Guinness, a gardener and former Chelsea judge that it was a “missed opportunity”5 for not choosing a female designer for the job when speaking to the Sunday Telegraph before discussing the link to institutional bias.

It’s a complex situation, is the term “grandma hobby” directly responsible for the undervaluing of women in the horticulture space, not solely, but it’s a reminder that we’ve come too far to let old prejudices slip in via the language we use. For some further reading, I suggest a deep dive into “Girlification” - a similar vein about how language can tip into negative representation for women, even when meant with empowering intention.

We must not forget that words have impact, even ones meant with kindness and endearment. As someone who actively changed my career from a stressful role to something that feels far more gentle on the nervous system, I understand the need to exclaim from the rooftops how wonderfully peaceful gardening is. But please, spare a thought for your fellow female gardeners. Call it whimsical, call it slow, but let’s leave the gendered part out of it shall we (please)?

Thank you for reading, allie x

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