MEET FASHION’S UNLIKELY MUSE

Every day, total strangers from all around the world message Gerald Stratford, 75, to ask about his enormous marrows.

Stratford’s game is growing big veg: tomatoes like cricket balls, squash (known as tromboncinos) as long as your arm and 300lb pumpkins the size of chandeliers.

‘People have asked how tall I am because they want to know if the vegetables look bigger than they actually are,’ says the man affectionately dubbed the King of Veg. ‘Well, I’m 6ft 4in, and the vegetables are what they are: big.’

More than 178k followers on Instagram and another 305k on X, the app formerly known as Twitter, watch Stratford happily potter around his little Cotswolds vegetable patch in his fuzzy red cabbage-print Alexander McQueen fleece, Crocs and trademark vegetable-pattern braces with his partner Elizabeth.

As he puts it, with a chuckle: ‘Everybody wants a piece of me with regards to me and my veg.’ He’s even featured in glossy advertising campaigns by lifestyle retailer White Stuff and Italian fashion giant Gucci.

White Stuff made him the centre of its Autumn/Winter 23 ‘The Good Life’ campaign (a hat tip to the 1970s BBC sitcom about green-fingered Surbiton suburbanites), celebrating him as a community spirit who does things ‘a bit differently’.

For his ‘Gucci off the Grid’ ad collaboration in 2021, in which recycled handbags were featured alongside Stratford and his gardening glad rags, ‘I was picked up by limousine on a Thursday night and zoomed off to a private farm in Hertfordshire. I was gobsmacked: my own dressing room, my own dressing gown, a gentleman assigned to look after me – and a hot-water bottle, because it was really cold. I was treated like a king.’

Before Stratford became a fashion star, he was a butcher, a Thames barge operator and a ‘fanatical’ amateur fisherman (‘Many years ago I spent the day in a charity fishing competition with [The Who singer] Roger Daltrey. We just spoke about fish’). And to that CV he can add ‘Gucci model’.

Stratford was introduced to social media by his nephew during lockdown. ‘I don’t want to be a dinosaur,’ he says.

His first viral post – a video in which he explains, in his soft West Country accent, how to grow rocket potatoes from seed – received so many thousands of likes that he hid his iPhone under a pillow to muffle its nonstop dinging.

‘I think initially the reason people liked coming to my garden was that in lockdown they were looking for hope.’

An average sunny day in his bungalow’s back garden means The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who blaring from his ‘cave’ – the big garden shed he built with his nephew. ‘I think my plants enjoy the music as much as me,’ he says.

Later he’ll upload videos of himself micro-fleecing the brassicas or nursing his homegrown Heinz tomatoes (forget ketchup; ‘we freeze them, we pickle them, we make jam’), a haphazard, humble and wholly organic social media strategy soundtracked largely by feelgood Van Morrison hits and the cooing of the odd wood pigeon.

But his life isn’t always sunshine and roses. ‘Eight years ago, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and it shook me rigid,’ he says.

‘A few months ago, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.’

He beat the cancer and to help manage his diabetes he’s on a new diet (he and Elizabeth say that they both eat from their garden all year round; homegrown tomatoes on rye bread are a staple). ‘I’ve already lost two stone’, he says.

The secret to his success, he thinks, is that we all yearn for the outdoors. ‘It’s that feeling of being at peace with the world, whether you’re playing with secateurs or cutting the grass,’ he says.

‘When you’re working with the soil you’re not worrying about the stresses of your life. You don’t have to be a professional gardener. Just have a go.’