Meet Garden Marcus, the TikTok Plantfluencer Brimming With Positivity

Marcus Bridgewater
Marcus BridgewaterPhoto: Courtesy of Dana Hammarstrom

In a sea of TikTok influencers, Garden Marcus is not only a trove of information if you’re looking to flex your green thumb, but a balm for the pandemic-induced chaos happening in the world. You won’t find roller skating or dance videos on the plantfluencer’s account. Instead, you’ll see him removing weeds and doling out wisdom around how negative thoughts can pop up unexpectedly or simply showcasing the process of cutting and planting an onion.

Since launching his TikTok channel in December 2019, Marcus Bridgewater—aka Garden Marcus—has become a guru on the platform, relating botany to humanity. The Houston-based gardening enthusiast, who has been compared to Bob Ross and Mister Rogers, can often be found disseminating monologues, for instance, about how “uprooting and relocating has to be done with care” while detailing the removal of an asparagus fern or about the significance of perseverance from his attempts to grow a sweet potato plant four times.

Despite his recent meteoric rise on TikTok, Bridgewater, 32, had been far removed from social media for the past decade. (He admittedly originally thought TikTok “was a calendar app.”) But his no-frills videos, which feature Bridgewater’s earnest optimism and toothy grin, have amassed more than 555,000 followers and 5.8 million likes.

White voices have often dominated the gardening space on digital platforms, which has made the space less welcoming to the Black community. But Black people have been connected to agriculture for generations. Bridgewater’s Garden Marcus is one of many Black plant and outdoor enthusiasts that have made gardening and plant love accessible. He joins a bevy of Black plantfluencers gaining visibility on social media, like BotanicalBlackGirl’s Stephanie Horton who created #BotanicalBlackGirl and #BlackHandsGreenThumb, interior plant designer and consultant Bri Saintt and #plantauntie Katura Barnes. “I'm thankful to have been able to be a positive representation, but it was never something that I saw coming or sought out,” says Bridgewater of his online presence.

Bridgewater’s interest in gardening didn’t start recently: He’s been working at it for more than six years. “My oldest friend's mom was getting rid of her nursery, and she gifted me 16 plants to bring to my house,” he says. “I got them home and started trying to take care of them, and I killed nine.” Bridgewater became dedicated to keeping the remaining plants alive, so he began learning, reading and experimenting. A few years into the process, he bought a plethora of plants that were near-death from a liquidation sale and started trying to bring them back to life. “They still had a little life left in the roots,” he says.

In addition to his newly minted status as a TikTok creator, Bridgewater is a life coach and the creator of Choice Forward, a company that shares “kindness, patience and positivity” through services like life coaching and workshops. Bridgewater applies the ethos of Choice Forward to Garden Marcus to not only educate people on gardening, but help them reframe their thinking, as well. “Garden Marcus is the embodiment of the choice for philosophy,” says Bridgewater. “Having experienced lots of different traditions, lots of different rituals [and] having had the great fortune to study with several different kinds of spiritual leaders, I developed a philosophy that I thought might help address humanity.”

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With COVID-19 impacting the world, Bridgewater is aware of its “correlation” with the increased visibility of his videos and their impact on people. With the help of Choice Forward co-founder Dana Hammarstrom, who shoots and edits his videos, Bridgewater began posting more content around when the pandemic flared up, but not as “a strategic move to gain followers.” “We recognized that as the pandemic was happening and more people were beginning to be isolated, the need to build mental health, physical fitness [and] spiritual awareness was that much higher,” he says. Bridgewater has since been posting more consistently, receiving feedback from fans saying they “needed” his videos. “We got a lot of comments about serotonin,” says Bridgewater. “With that encouragement, it was like, okay, well we want to continue to make really high-caliber, high-quality content for people.” And he has. Over the past few months, he’s shared aspirational videos focused on positivity (“Remember to be positive so that we don’t let our stresses take over and turn into anxiety”), breaking the roots of a dwarf ruellia for planting and reflecting on the appreciation of worms in the soil and relating it to caring about other communities.

But with more than 787,000 likes, one of the videos Bridgewater has received the most feedback on was his pineapple propagation video. In addition to showing the process of cutting off the head of the pineapple and putting the trimmed fruit in water, he reflects on the joy of its growth. “The awareness and the patience it takes to stop and focus on something's growth is incredible,” he says. “I think a lot of people resonated with that, and it really made them stop and be like, 'Man, that's, that's awesome to watch something grow over many years.'”

As Bridgewater’s social media presence grows, he plans to use his platform on TikTok—along with YouTube and Instagram—to share more content related to Choice Forward, webinars and self-help tips. Recently, he’s started a Patreon focused on doing more webinars. Beyond that, his sole focus is on sharing positive messages “with an uplifting and motivational undertone,” revealing that humans and plants are not so dissimilar.

“Life lessons are not easy to swallow sometimes, so we wanted to make all of the content easily digestible,” he says. “And that's why the garden is so helpful because it's very easy to appreciate the colors, to feel the calm and the peace that's in the garden, and at the same time, while seeing and feeling those things, it's a great opportunity to show the likeness between plants as a living creature and us, human beings, as a species.