‘Plant Kween’ Christopher Griffin
CHRIS AZZOPARDI | Q Syndicate
If your social feed has ever stopped you mid-scroll because a monstera looked like it’s been better-tended than you have, you’ve probably already found Christopher Griffin — known to their 800,000-strong plant-loving community as Plant Kween.
Griffin — @plantkween on Instagram and author of You Grow, Gurl! — has turned houseplant care into something much bigger than watering schedules and sunlight charts.
For the Brooklyn-based creator, tending to greenery is about tending to ourselves: nurturing softness in a world that demands hardness, especially from Black, queer and nonbinary folks.
What began as a love passed down from a grandmother has grown into a platform rooted in care, curiosity and radical community-building — one that now extends from practical plant advice and work with New York institutions like Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to their newest video series, Experimenting With…, in which Griffin turns the camera inward to explore everything from bilateral hearing loss to roller skating to makeup.
Pride Source caught up with Griffin to talk plants, Black queer joy, the politics of green spaces and why a humble houseplant might just make us better at holding the line for each other.
Pride Source: How did you become Plant Kween? Christopher Griffin: It started when I was younger. I was obsessed with my grandmother — this Black woman in the church scene. I felt like she was a goddess in my family. She introduced me to plants, and then, later in life, I bought my first one, and I still have it. It’s [at least] 14 years old.
So I started testing different ways of showing up online and finding people, community-building and using it as an opportunity to build bridges. Now it’s turned into this amazing multidisciplinary space where I get to explore myself and my interests and float into spaces that I wouldn’t have access to if I was still working as an educator.
How did you make that shift from academia? The shift was very gradual. After working at Harvey Milk High School as a college counselor, I went and worked for NYU for nearly a decade in student activities. I was working my nine-to-five and casually posting, and then I got my first brand deal just on my own.
It was like, “We want to pay you $4,000 for a video,” and I was like, “All I gotta do is be on camera? I do this every day at my job at NYU.” The perception of the value of my time changed completely. Then the pandemic hit. I was home, bored as hell. That’s when it really skyrocketed.
Do you see plant care as part of nurturing spaces that sustain us when the world doesn’t? It’s one method. There are different pathways to caring for ourselves or nurturing the nurturer within us. Plants can teach us to sit still. With how technology has us wrapped around its finger, I think it’s important for us to just sit with something real.
It’s a very low threshold: a living being that you can practice on in terms of care. Like, what kind of nurturer are you? What are the various different ways that you can care for yourself?
Are you drinking water? Are you giving yourself room to grow? Are you pruning those dead, yellowing leaves that you need to let go of so you can refocus your energy on other things? Are you getting yourself in sunlight? [Building empathy is] something that we can all be better at practicing because we need more of it.
As a Black queer creator, what does activism look like for you right now? I think when it comes to activism, as it relates to any marginalized community, we often pay attention to the most visible forms of activism: protesting, literally being on the front lines. But I think of us functioning as a clock. There are multiple pieces that have to happen; there are different jobs that we all have to do in order to make this clock work and to help our community continue to move forward. And some of it is not super visible. Some of it is just maybe donating money. Maybe it’s reallocating resources; maybe it’s watering people that can’t water themselves.
For Black, queer, trans, nonbinary folks, none of this is new. I grew up with an understanding of how I was perceived in the world, and that was concentrated around my Blackness. My parents really were like, “You are a Black, flamboyant boy in America.” That really prepared me with a level of confidence and a foundational love that has allowed me to be strong in these times and to stand on my own two feet and to understand my self-worth, to know that the hate and the negativity that folks put onto me has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with them.
So holding the line for me lately has been existing unapologetically in my truth. It has been holding space for family and friends who are going through times and just need a listening ear. I have been told that I give good hugs, and that I have rejuvenating energy.
Your joyfulness can be seen as a kind of defiance. Do you see it that way? I think joy is that fuel that keeps us going. Joy is us saying, “Despite everything you’re trying to throw at us, I still know who I am.” It’s understanding that these systems were really never for us, and that we have to manifest that joy for ourselves. My grandmother would always say, “I’m the author of my own joy.”
[When this country was being created] they didn’t have [marginalized communities] in mind.
So we do have to be the authors of our own joy. We do have to create those systems … of community care. My community care is a part of the work that I do. I’ve always been in service of other people, whether I’m educating them, whether I’m empowering them, whether I’m giving them some food for thought for them to figure out.
What is the biggest lesson plant care can teach us? We’re basically houseplants with complex emotions. So everything that we do for plants, we can do for each other. Water each other, feed each other nutrients, check in on each other occasionally, but not too much. You don’t want to be a helicopter plant parent. No overwatering. Every plant needs space to grow and do their own thing. Every plant and person needs to be checked up on.
Chris Azzopardi is the executive editor and brand director of Pride Source Media Group and Q Syndicate, the national LGBTQ+ wire service.