Take Your Plants Off
Austin keeps hoeing despite losing the title of top nude gardening city
Austin is now the No. 2 city for naked gardening nationwide.
Austin gardeners, pull up your trousers — we have something important to talk about. We've lost our top spot as the nation's No. 1 naked gardeners. Sure, it's nice in Miami, our new leader, and the only thing better than gardening naked is taking a naked gardening break with a cubano (the sandwich or the person). But as the runner up, we have everything we need to come back from this next year.
LawnStarter, a yard care platform, is the journalistic hero who compiled the data to set these rankings for World Naked Gardening Day on May 6, including factors like "nudist population size, indecent exposure laws, and, of course, gardener-friendliness." Even though Austin's ranking fell to No. 2, we did better than 198 other cities, most notably Atlanta, Georgia, at No. 3.
The next-best Texas city for stripping down is good old Houston, at No. 9, and Dallas made No. 18, but watch out for those bugs in any of these three Texas cities. Hilariously, all three also did not do particularly well in the weather or safety rankings. They just really want to do it. They all cracked the top 15 in both local interest and "nude gardener friendliness." So wave to your neighbor, but don't stare too hard.
Things are going okay for naked gardeners in El Paso, San Antonio, and Plano (Nos. 75, 78, and 82 respectively). It all starts going downhill in Fort Worth (No. 105) and interest starts to wane. If you're thinking about tossing your top over the garden fence, just know that Laredo is a downright awful place to do it — in fact, at No. 195, there are only five worse places to do it. Ironically, if anyone does warm up to the idea, they can try it without worrying too much; even though only seven cities show less of an interest in naked gardening, 56 are less friendly and a large majority rank as less safe.
Austin only made the very top in one category, which was a tie, and a very specific one at that: "most Google searches for Naked Gardening Day-related terms over past year." Austin and New York both had the most searches, and Dallas had the next-most in a five-way tie. Austin also got a leg up thanks to the looseness of its nudity laws.
It's inspiring, really: What makes a top naked gardening city is the desire to be one (naked ambition, if you will), so Austin knows exactly how to reclaim the title next time around. For better motivation always garden naked together.
