Nelson ZêPequéno says the internet needs less hustle culture, and more horticulture

If your feed is currently a miserable loop of crypto bros and doomscrolling, he would like to offer you a way out.
Nelson ZêPequéno, founder of Black Men With Gardens, smiles while holding a bouquet of pink heliconia and broom flowers in his Los Angeles studio.

Nelson ZêPequéno shares a name with the notorious drug trafficker in Brazilian cinema. It’s a full bait-and-switch. When you hear “Zé Pequeno,” you expect the gun-toting kingpin from Fernando Meirelles’s 2002 film City of God. When you pull up the Los Angeles-based artist’s feed, you get a guy with locs teaching his 150,000 followers how to untangle a root-bound pothos without shocking the plant.

“It baffles me that it’s still shocking to people to see an image of a Black man with plants,” he told Hypebeast in 2022. “That just shows how invisible we were. It’s not like we don’t exist. It’s just that wasn’t the focus.”

Machine learning models have a categorization problem. If you started posting content featuring Black men in 2017, the algorithms offered you roughly two predetermined buckets to live in (videos of police brutality, or hyper-capitalist hustle culture) and made no real provision for a guy just trying to keep his monstera alive. The only portrayals available, as ZêPequéno would later put it, were “the exceptions or the ones that are being brutalized.” He started Black Men With Gardens in late 2017,  a page for the guys building raised beds in their backyards and nursing pothos vines in cramped apartments, after noticing how completely Black men were missing from online gardening content.

What he made instead is one of the more soothing feeds on Instagram, by which we mean: men in durags repotting fiddle leaf figs, teaching their kids how to mix soil at the right ratio, walking you through the math on how four windowsill containers with less than a dollar of seed will produce a salad’s worth of microgreens in two weeks, and how to repurpose a pair of old Nike Dunks into planters (easily the most wholesome footwear content on the internet). The aesthetic adds up to something the internet has historically gone out of its way not to associate with Black men: unspectacular domestic peace.

One of the more unexpected categories of mail ZêPequéno fields is from older white women writing to share, with apparent sincerity, how the page has changed how they read a Black man on the street. He shared one such message with the Los Angeles Times in 2021. “I’ve had old white ladies write me on Instagram and be like, ‘Hey, because of your Instagram page, I’m more likely to think the Black guy walking behind me is on his way to a plant shop and not thinking about robbing me.’ That’s a real message that I got, and I think that was sent with sincerity.”

ZêPequéno came to the U.S. from Accra at age five, raised alongside three sisters by a single father on a minimum-wage salary in an apartment with no real budget for art supplies. The first pieces he ever made were assembled from sticks he foraged from the lot outside his building.

Sustain is the formal name for the foraging. Out of an LA studio, he builds high-end floral installations entirely from upcycled city trash and salvaged organic material, an aesthetic he describes as “the artform of infusing living elements with discarded relics from a consumerist society.”

Black Men With Gardens followed a Hollywood detour. ZêPequéno started around 2015 on the ground floor of an event company that supplied film and LED rigs to most of the major studios, and within five years he had climbed to Scenic Lead, constructing activations for Apple, the Grammys, iHeartMusic, and the premieres of Joker and The Irishman. For most of those years, he was sleeping in his car.

When live events shut down in March 2020, his industry income went with them, and when the industry came back, he didn’t go with it.

“As an artist I’m not going to sit around waiting for somebody to create something for me,” he told Rêve En Vert. “That’s my job. If I can envision it, if I can think about it, if it’s a challenge, then it’s my job to think of a creative solution for it. And Black Men With Gardens was my way of doing that.”

Off the grid, ZêPequéno hosts IRL floral design workshops around Los Angeles, an entrepreneurial venture called Plants and Anime, and the occasional solo trip to Joshua Tree in a Dometic rig whenever the city starts pressing in. In 2025, Pique Action and Harvard’s C-CHANGE named him a Climate Creator to Watch: recognition for years of translating climate change from a doom-laden abstraction into something you can do on a windowsill.

“If you look deeper into any of the people that we’ve posted,” he says to the LA Times, “they’re not just plant people. I’m not just a plant person. They are actual people with very complex, deep lives, and our page helps to show that to people.”

Written by: HQ

Nelson ZêPequéno shares a name with the notorious drug trafficker in Brazilian cinema. It’s a full bait-and-switch. When you hear “Zé Pequeno,” you expect the gun-toting kingpin from Fernando Meirelles’s 2002 film City of God. When you pull up the Los Angeles-based artist’s feed, you get a guy with locs teaching his 150,000 followers how to untangle a root-bound pothos without shocking the plant.

“It baffles me that it’s still shocking to people to see an image of a Black man with plants,” he told Hypebeast in 2022. “That just shows how invisible we were. It’s not like we don’t exist. It’s just that wasn’t the focus.”

Machine learning models have a categorization problem. If you started posting content featuring Black men in 2017, the algorithms offered you roughly two predetermined buckets to live in (videos of police brutality, or hyper-capitalist hustle culture) and made no real provision for a guy just trying to keep his monstera alive. The only portrayals available, as ZêPequéno would later put it, were “the exceptions or the ones that are being brutalized.” He started Black Men With Gardens in late 2017,  a page for the guys building raised beds in their backyards and nursing pothos vines in cramped apartments, after noticing how completely Black men were missing from online gardening content.

What he made instead is one of the more soothing feeds on Instagram, by which we mean: men in durags repotting fiddle leaf figs, teaching their kids how to mix soil at the right ratio, walking you through the math on how four windowsill containers with less than a dollar of seed will produce a salad’s worth of microgreens in two weeks, and how to repurpose a pair of old Nike Dunks into planters (easily the most wholesome footwear content on the internet). The aesthetic adds up to something the internet has historically gone out of its way not to associate with Black men: unspectacular domestic peace.

One of the more unexpected categories of mail ZêPequéno fields is from older white women writing to share, with apparent sincerity, how the page has changed how they read a Black man on the street. He shared one such message with the Los Angeles Times in 2021. “I’ve had old white ladies write me on Instagram and be like, ‘Hey, because of your Instagram page, I’m more likely to think the Black guy walking behind me is on his way to a plant shop and not thinking about robbing me.’ That’s a real message that I got, and I think that was sent with sincerity.”

ZêPequéno came to the U.S. from Accra at age five, raised alongside three sisters by a single father on a minimum-wage salary in an apartment with no real budget for art supplies. The first pieces he ever made were assembled from sticks he foraged from the lot outside his building.

Sustain is the formal name for the foraging. Out of an LA studio, he builds high-end floral installations entirely from upcycled city trash and salvaged organic material, an aesthetic he describes as “the artform of infusing living elements with discarded relics from a consumerist society.”

Black Men With Gardens followed a Hollywood detour. ZêPequéno started around 2015 on the ground floor of an event company that supplied film and LED rigs to most of the major studios, and within five years he had climbed to Scenic Lead, constructing activations for Apple, the Grammys, iHeartMusic, and the premieres of Joker and The Irishman. For most of those years, he was sleeping in his car.

When live events shut down in March 2020, his industry income went with them, and when the industry came back, he didn’t go with it.

“As an artist I’m not going to sit around waiting for somebody to create something for me,” he told Rêve En Vert. “That’s my job. If I can envision it, if I can think about it, if it’s a challenge, then it’s my job to think of a creative solution for it. And Black Men With Gardens was my way of doing that.”

Off the grid, ZêPequéno hosts IRL floral design workshops around Los Angeles, an entrepreneurial venture called Plants and Anime, and the occasional solo trip to Joshua Tree in a Dometic rig whenever the city starts pressing in. In 2025, Pique Action and Harvard’s C-CHANGE named him a Climate Creator to Watch: recognition for years of translating climate change from a doom-laden abstraction into something you can do on a windowsill.

“If you look deeper into any of the people that we’ve posted,” he says to the LA Times, “they’re not just plant people. I’m not just a plant person. They are actual people with very complex, deep lives, and our page helps to show that to people.”

Written by: HQ

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