Gardening provides a regular source of gold and reagents as well as treasure cards and pet snacks, plus they look cool. Definitely worth it if you put the time into it.
It's worth it if you hatch & train pets. The consistent supply of mega snacks is very useful. The treasure cards, reagents and secondary snacks also provide pretty much endless supply of gold. Many reagents for crafting are also more easily obtained from gardening.
gardening perpetuates just about everything else you do. You get:
1) seeds for further gardening (many seeds will drop their own seed at elder harvest, some, like Key Limes, will drop them 75% of the time you mature harvest) 2) reagents for crafting 3) TC for gold/PvP/PvE 4) gold;I have yet to hear of a broke gardener in W101 5) pet snacks for pet training/massive amounts of gold
The trick is getting the energy gear to allow you to manage those huge gardens some of us have
gardening gives you reagents, treasure cards, snacks, and also mega snacks to train your pet. you don' need to farm or find reagents for crafting if you have proper seeds to give them.
Couch potatoes are a good source for Mega food Alligator pear trees give a good assortment of attack TC. King parsley is a must if you want amber, you just need one to start with and it will give you a chance for more than one seed.I started off with one and I'm growing a 104 of them right now on two characters. Amber is a rare drop.So far I've collected roughly about 175 amber from them. They all give gold, reagents, pet snacks and TC, and not that hard to take care of.
There are a lot of "extras" in this game that don't seem worthwhile if you look at them in a vacuum, especially when you're just started out and don't fully understand how they can impact one another.
To me and many others, gardening is definitely worthwhile. Some people find no value in it. We all have different styles, different priorities, and different needs.
My suggestion, do everything you can (including gardening) and figure out how you can use it to your advantage to progress in the game. Do some research on plants, see which ones drop things you consider valuable. You can find a wealth of information in this regard on wizard101central.com.
When starting out, my suggestion is to pay attention to XP rewards. Some plants may not have drops you particularly care for, but to start out it's good to look for the highest XP rewards to advance your gardening level to get to the plants you want a little quicker.
If I remember correctly (this is going back a few years now), I would start out with Pink Dandelions, move on to King Parsley, and then Silver Trumpet Vines to level up. I still harvest King Parsley for Amber, but for the most part my gardening priorities are with Evil Magma Peas and Deadly Helephant Ears for a balanced diet of Mega pet snacks for training.