How hip gardeners and viral florists are making it cool to be green

Kate Moss is buying plants and florists are going viral on Instagram — it’s never been hipper to be green, says Victoria Gaiger
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Victoria Gaiger15 July 2016

There is something stirring in the undergrowth, a revolution germinating on our allotments, a wind of change blowing through London’s window boxes ... Gardening, for so long the domain of the stately, the suburban and the middle-aged, has blossomed into chic.

Five years ago I moved with my family to a wreck in the suburbs with a large garden attached. We did so in the hope that our three sons would escape into the great outdoors, ride bikes down the rackety brick paths, climb the gnarled old apple trees and play football on a lawn that appeared, to our inner-city eyes, to be a polo pitch. But we were certainly not prepared for what happened next. Namely, a pressing need to take up gardening before we lost the five-year-old in the rapidly growing wilderness.

But no one we knew could tell us what to do — certainly no one from my day job as a fashion editor on a glossy magazine.

How times change. Today nothing could be more on trend than digging your hands into soil and tuning into the rhythms of the natural world. Walk through Hackney and marvel at the greenery on show. Even supermarkets near Chatsworth Road — once known as “murder mile” — have waterfalls of foliage inside the front doors. Just down the street is Botany, a cactus shop.

And it’s not alone. Succulent stores are springing up across London, houseplant sales are booming, florists are huge hits on Instagram, beekeepers tend hives on top of art galleries, allotments have closed their waiting lists and hip hotels such as Ham Yard plant wild meadows on their roofs. What on earth has been going on?

The truth, as any gardener knows, is that nothing happens overnight. Soon after we left our flat in Highgate, Kate Moss moved in around the corner. Weeks later she was seen shopping in a garden centre in Camden. And where Kate goes, others follow.

Today designer Sir Paul Smith is always among the first through the gates at the Chelsea Flower Show; the editor of British Vogue Alexandra Shulman proudly tells me her sister has written a book about Alpine plants; crowds mass at Tate Modern to file past Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of flowers, and Glastonbury hires gardeners to arrange houseplants backstage.

Guerrilla gardener Richard Reynolds

And now London’s new breed of urban horticultural lovers have a magazine of their own, rakesprogress, which, appropriately enough, I produced with my husband from a shed in our garden.

More Wallpaper than Gardener’s World, we wanted an antidote to mystifying advice about mulching, potting on and double digging. Flick through its pages and you’ll find the fashion designer Nigel Cabourn in his garden, the jeweller Alex Monroe in his shed, Martin Parr on the art of photographing rhubarb, Hackney jam- makers who boil up fruit foraged from the Olympic Park, advertising executives who style themselves “guerrilla gardeners” and photographer Steve Benbow, who sold his cameras on eBay to devote his life to bees.

“We are all searching for our own green oasis in confined urban spaces,” says Benbow, 47, who these days runs the London Honey Company, with hives on top of Tate Modern and the White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey. “Just as the countryside is being gobbled up we’re desperate for greenery. People are growing stuff where they can.”

They certainly are. Because just as the Industrial Revolution spawned William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, the internet has seemingly spawned a generation who know how to use apps but are desperate to work with their hands.

Grace and Thorn plants

Simone Gooch is a 25-year-old florist from Sydney, Australia, who arrived in London nearly two years ago. Her career took off when an editor at Vogue spotted her work on Instagram.

In the same way that foodies share snaps of dinner on their phones, lovers of the new flower power post pictures of blooms. “I’m pretty particular about which photos I upload. Some of the things I put on Instagram are quite unusual,” she says. “But I’m starting to get briefs for arrangements which are wayward and crazy.”

Now every day is a blur as she fills her van at dawn in Covent Garden Market to weave her magic for fashion houses, PR companies and the kind of individuals who can afford to hire the florist of the moment to scatter her minimalist creations through their homes.

Richard Reynolds, on the other hand, operates under cover. By day he is a 38-year-old strategic planner in a top advertising agency. By night he transforms himself into the “guerilla gardener”, an urban superhero who, as he puts it, “fights the filth with forks and flowers”.

Once described by Alan Titchmarsh as the chief commandant of guerrilla gardening, Reynolds lives in a tower block in Elephant and Castle, from where he launches sorties to sow seeds in tree pits and plant hardy perennials in the middle of roundabouts.

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“It started in 2004 when I moved into the tower block,” he says. “I was itching to get gardening again and the neglected flowerbeds outside my block seemed the logical place to start. I bought some plants and it just grew from there. Like graffiti artists who see a dreary wall and think ‘I could cheer it up by expressing myself on it’, I do the same but with flowers and plants.”

Another who has scratched her gardening itch is Nik Southern, 39. Born in a council flat in Islington, she now runs Grace & Thorn, a plant shop with queues running out of the door in Soho and Hackney. Its hashtag — #green upyourgaff — is as far from the Latin labels stuck in plant tubs as she is from Percy Thrower.

She spent 13 years working in the City — “I hated it” — before deciding to chuck in her job in IT in 2014 to open her first shop on Hackney Road. “I did a floristry course and I loved it. But I’ve always loved houseplants so I decided to marry the two.” Her timing was as impeccable as her arrangements.

“Houseplants are a good way to bring the outdoors in. But they are also an inexpensive way to decorate your flat. It can become an obsession, like a new Céline handbag. Young people can’t wait to stick their hands in soil. There is a craze to bring nature indoors.”

It’s ironic then that Southern has now turned her attention outdoors — to the “massive garden” she’s just moved to near Epping in Essex. “It’s mental there. There are plants inside and out. Plants everywhere. We started with tomatoes. My boyfriend’s got the greenhouse — he’s a bit obsessive with it. And my dad — who used to hate gardening — stays here at the weekend and even he’s loving it.”

When your dad takes up your hobby is it time to find a new one? “I hate talking about plants being fashionable,” says Southern. “A lot of our clients are from the fashion world but this is nature. It’s not man-made. It’s never going to go out of fashion.”

I know she’s right.

Victoria Gaiger is the co-editor of rakesprogress, which is on sale now. For more information go to rakesprogressmagazine.com.

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