My First Flower Garden From Seed — With ChatGPT as My Garden Coach

By Sarah Hope

This summer I tried something I’d never done before: grow a flower garden from seed at our cabin in Alaska.

I didn’t take a class or buy a gardening book. I did what I do all day in my business — I asked AI. Every time I got stuck, I took a photo, sent it to ChatGPT, and asked: where should this go, what should I look for, how do I do this right?

Here’s how it went.

Starting from dirt

It started with a picnic table, a stack of pots and a bag of potting soil.

Empty pots filled with potting soil lined up on a red picnic table

Me holding up a freshly filled pot of soil in front of the cabin

The seeds

I picked annuals that promise to bloom fast — bachelor buttons and nasturtiums. The packets say 42 days and 32 days to bloom, which felt about right for my level of patience.

Four packets of nasturtium seeds, Dwarf Jewel and Dwarf Cherry Rose

Something actually came up

This is the part where I got a little giddy. The pots filled with green.

Pots and planters full of seedlings on the red picnic table

Seedlings planted in a raised wooden bed

Letting AI draw the plan

The beds around the property were the bigger project. I sent ChatGPT a photo of one of them — a mound around an old stump — and asked where to put the shrubs I’d bought. It came back with a planting map: what goes where, how far apart, and a clear note not to dig into the stump.

ChatGPT’s annotated planting map for the stump bed, showing where each shrub should go and how far apart

This one’s an AI image — ChatGPT marked up my photo with the plan.

Its tip for keeping weeds down was to lay newspaper or cardboard over the bed first, then cover it with a thick layer of mulch. So that’s what I did.

Cardboard laid down around the new plants before mulching

A finished bed, freshly mulched, with a pink peony blooming at one end

“Is this one any good?”

My favorite use was at the store. Before buying a shrub, I snapped a photo of it in the cart and asked if it was healthy. ChatGPT walked through the foliage, the stems and the woody bottom — and told me not to worry about the rough-looking base.

ChatGPT’s annotated check of a shrub in a shopping cart, with notes on foliage, stems and the base

Another AI markup — its verdict on a shrub before I bought it.

I even asked about lining one edge of the property with evergreens. It suggested spruce, spaced out in a gentle arc, and mocked up what that could look like.

ChatGPT’s mockup of a row of evergreens along the edge of the lawn, with a planting plan

AI mockup — not planted (yet).

Alaska did some of the work

Not everything was new. The peonies bloomed like they’d been waiting all year for us, and the wildflowers around the property didn’t need any help from me at all.

A big pink peony in bloom

Lupine and wildflowers growing wild next to an old tree stump

What I took away

It’s the same lesson I keep learning in my business: you don’t have to be the expert to start. You have to be willing to ask good questions, take a picture of where you actually are, and follow the plan one step at a time.

My first garden isn’t perfect. But it’s mine, it’s growing, and I learned more this summer than I would have by waiting until I “knew enough.”