From Gourds to gucci: a day in the garden with gerald stratford
I’m driving through a sleepy village in the Cotswolds, on my way to spend the day with a man who's achieving BIG things from his back garden.
Gerald Stratford —a.k.a The King of Veg — waves a warm welcome as I pull up outside his garden fence, his face spread into the widest of smiles. Despite his tender age of 72 and his two metal knees, he stands strong and upright, sporting a pair of wire-framed glasses and a patchwork print floral shirt that I soon find out is a collaboration piece he designed with Alexander McQueen. Much as I expected, he doesn’t look like your average gardener.
I’d become aware of champion ‘big veg’ grower Gerald in 2020. He’d (albeit unintentionally) exploded on Twitter during lockdown, when a video he’d posted of his potato harvest caught traction. A newbie to the social-media world, he’d gone ‘viral’ before he even knew what the word meant. His wholesome content, loveable personality, and iconic dress-sense saw him instantaneously taken to the nation’s hearts, his humble follower count of 96 rapidly multiplying to the audience of 500,000 he has today, across the platforms.
The first stop on my grand tour of the Stratfords’ garden is the ‘hot-house’, where Gerald grows peppers of various kinds: from curvaceous bell peppers, to menacing looking birds-eye chillies, and cayenne peppers specifically for his daughter who uses them to relieve the symptoms of her terminal illness. Next, we venture into an adjacent greenhouse, where aubergines dangle like precious jewels from their plants, jumbo onions protrude from their soil, and an ungainly cucumber is cradled by a fabric sling to help support its weight. The whole garden, Gerald explains, is hooked up to a self-watering system that he engineered with a garden tech company, specifically to meet the needs of big veg growers like himself.
“Look up!”, Gerald says as we wind our way down the lavender-flanked garden path. Our eyes follow a thick stem as it climbs high into the sky, culminating in a gigantic sunflower, so heavy it can hardly hold its head up. We pass towering punnets of fresh plums waiting to be transported to the kitchen to be made into jam by Liz, Gerald’s wife, and buckets of newly harvested purple potatoes. “If you ever want to impress people at a dinner party with some posh veg, make purple mash”, Gerald advises me. Clearly a connoisseur in the kitchen, Gerald has a recipe recommendation for every vegetable imaginable. That being said, when we stop for lunch, two cheese rolls and a tango is enough to hit the spot.
Next, we enter a smaller greenhouse, overflowing with tomatoes of all different sizes and colours. An old Sony radio hangs from the roof, and I can’t help but wonder what Gerald plays to the tomatoes to make them flourish. He picks a marbled orange one of the ‘Sunblast’ variety and pops it in his mouth. “We never wash our vegetables, they go straight from the garden to the plate”, he tells me before crushing it between his teeth, “people are so scared of dirt, but a little bit is good for the immune system”.
A large portion of the garden is dedicated to the gourds. Amidst a tangle of leaves, a striped parasol protrudes, sheltering his most promising one from the sun lest it overheat before competition season. Gerald proudly shows me his French bean that’s only two inches away from breaking the world record. With just over a month left of grow-time, he’s feeling confident that it’s got the potential to go all the way.
By the front door to the bungalow, dozens of repurposed milk cartons are cut open to make planting pots and nailed to the fence in rows; each container houses a different type of herb or salad leaf, from lambs lettuce to curry leaves — which, at first glance, look like rosemary. I give the leaves a squeeze to release the scent, and the curry smell remains on my hands for the rest of the day. “This is the salad bar, it’s Liz’s territory”, Gerald informs me.
But the milk cartons are not the only example of up-cycling in the garden. Gerald uses his public platform to advocate for a range of sustainable practices — from growing seasonally, to sourcing locally, up-cycling, re-purposing, and avoiding the use of chemicals. The multiple beds of striking marigold flowers that I’d spent the afternoon admiring are, for example, Gerald’s preferred alternative to artificial insecticides, their smell a natural deterrent to pests. And his large, throne-like garden chair was built from old wooden cable drums he would’ve otherwise discarded.
It’s largely this commitment to the environment that has attracted interest from major names in the fashion world such as Gucci and McQueen. For their new sustainable collection, Gucci elected Gerald as the face of their campaign ‘Gucci in the Garden’, in which he appears to be educating a group of young people on all things veg; ‘I think the models saw he as a bit of a father figure’, he tells me’. But, having always has a passion for clothes, Gerald meets this new dimension to his career with enthusiasm. “Who’s to decide that I shouldn’t dress up just because I’m a gardener?” he says.
From matching cabbage-print fleece and hat, to a loud veg-print tracksuit, veg-print braces, and his special McQueen floral patchwork shirt, I’m lucky to see first-hand some of Gerald’s most iconic outfits throughout the day; he excitedly scampers back and forth to his wardrobe for numerous quick-changes, keen to showcase his finest and boldest looks. I quietly rejoice in seeing someone of his age embracing the limelight and taking such pride in his appearance. Even when spending a day alone in the garden, he likes to make an effort, he tells me.
The late summer air is still and silent, the lack of intrusive noise un-ignorable. You can almost hear the beating wings of the butterflies as they flutter by. ‘We don’t care much for holidays’, Liz tells me, ‘our garden is our happy place’. And I can understand why. Away from the noise and activity of social media, life here is slow and mindful, the pace and rhythm dictated by nature.
Working first as a butcher in his teens, and then as a tug-boat driver on the Thames for most of adulthood, being social media stardom wasn’t something Gerald had ever been primed for, yet he’s taken to it like a duck to water. But, despite the fan-mail lining his office walls, and his inflatable ‘Veg King’ crown, he seems refreshingly unchanged and un-phased by it. Perhaps it’s the wisdom he’s accumulated over his seventy-odd years that means he’s able to remain grounded, or the fact that his work requires manual labour and — quite literally — getting his hands dirty.
