They’re hot on Instagram and YouTube, and love nothing more than getting muddy – meet the gardeners of the future. By Colin Crummy
Claire Ratinon, 34, was working in TV production in New York when she stumbled across Brooklyn Grange, an acre of rooftop farm seven storeys up in Queens. “I looked across at the Manhattan skyline while standing among kale, peppers and tomatoes, growing in the middle of the sky, and fell in love,” she says. Ratinon, from Surrey, started volunteering, picking tomatoes and getting sunburnt. It sowed the seed of something: “It was the calmest, cleanest place in the city and somewhere my soul was saying, this is where you need to spend more time.”
You suddenly want to be outside, you have a sense of pride and ownership
The average age of gardening presenters and writers is a lot older – I’ve been doing this by myself and had 20m views
Gardening is just seen as pushing a wheelbarrow about all day; it’s seen as a career for the no-hopers