Furloughed and fed up during the first Covid lockdown, Jason Williams decided to have a go at gardening. His gateway plant was a French marigold, bought from B&Q, and he spent the following months making YouTube videos as he learned what thrives on an 18th floor balcony in central Manchester.
Unlike the rest of us who picked up a trowel for the first time during the pandemic, Williams’ lockdown “cloud garden” was such a success that he has been invited to recreate it for this year’s Chelsea flower show.
The 35-year-old bar manager will be making his Chelsea debut in the show’s “small space gardening” section, which was introduced last year as a response to the boom in balcony and container horticulture.
Describing his gardening style as “perfectly imperfect”, Williams has built up a dedicated online following for his candid videos.
Starring as the Cloud Gardener (Cloudy to his fans), he is sometimes dressed in a kimono teamed with what appears to be a silken shower cap, occasionally weeping with joy or despair. He gives as much airtime to his failures as his successes, paying tender homage to the plants he has inadvertently killed (though he prefers the term “unalived”).
The sunflowers were a flop (“the leaves are too big and they suffer really harshly from windburn, so I unalived them”), but the passionfruit and grapes are going great guns. One day he dreams of harvesting enough to make wine.
He has learned a lot about gardening at height, where the winds from the Lancashire plain can rip the head off a delicate rose but temperatures can sometimes be a whole 10C higher than at ground level. And who knew that bumblebees could reach the 18th floor?
Williams prides himself on being honest, speaking out about his anxiety and depression, and when things go awry. “On social media, there is this urge to make everything perfect and so everything has to be filtered. But all throughout my content there’s absolutely no filtering, there’s no colour adjustments,” he said. “I purposely will show everybody my dead plants because I think it’s really important so that people understand that gardening is challenging.”
When he applied for Chelsea he stressed that he wanted his show garden to be accessible “to show what can be done in a realistic way”. His target audience is “people who would never even think about Chelsea”.
All of the plants in his Chelsea garden have been tried and tested on his Manchester balcony, and can be bought in a bog-standard garden centre. “What I didn’t want to do is create some show garden masterpiece that people cannot replicate, or if they did, they would fail and be like, ‘Ah, I don’t have the green thumb’, and stop,” he said.
He wants to challenge the idea that black people don’t garden. “We do. You just don’t tend to see it on TV.” There was Danny Clarke, the Black Gardener, he said, and Tayshan Hayden-Smith, a footballer who now appears on Your Garden Made Perfect. “But there’s not much representation for young black males especially,” said Williams.
“I’m hoping that there’ll be some young gardeners and some budding young designers out there, who will see me and it might give them the belief that they can actually appear at Chelsea too. I mean, I have no gardening or landscaping experience whatsoever. So if I can make it, then so can they.”
