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From VEGPATCH to VOGUE!

He must be the unlikeliest fashion model EVER: A 72-year-old ex-trout farmer with a talent for growing giant vegetables. So how did Gerald become the 24-carrot star of Gucci’s latest ad campaign?

By Jane Fryer

FOR the past few years, Gerald Stratford has spent almost every waking hour tending his enormous vegetable patch, two allotments, extremely busy propagating shed and the homemade hanging herb garden created from old milk bottle containers by his back door.

During a tea break, the 72-year- old might admire his enormous carrots, 6 lb onions, bloated mangel-wurzel and 3 ft-long parsnips.

If he’s feeling particularly energetic, he’ll perhaps knock up a batch of home-made compost — he gets through six tons a year — or plant out seedlings that his partner Liz, 77, has sown.

‘Liz looks after the babies and I take care of the adults,’ he says. ‘But everything we plant are our children.’

To encourage them to grow, and grow, and grow, he chats to them constantly.

‘Course I do! Just as I’d chat to you,’ he says, astonished I’d even ask. He also plays them music. ‘If, like today, it’s all sunny, I play some lovely soothing blues,’ he explains.

‘But if it’s raining and storming and they look sad, I’ll give ’em a bit of rock to cheer ’em up.’

Most of all though, he just feels happy — to have his beloved Liz by his side, his garden, his talent for growing ‘big veg’, and to be alive and healthy.

Lately, though, life has become rather more complicated for Gerald and Liz.

Because, thanks to the photos of homegrown veg which he started sharing via social media shortly before lockdown, Gerald has become something of a celebrity, and not just in the beautiful Cotswolds village of Milton-under-Wychwood.

To his enormous surprise, he now has more than 300,000 Twitter followers, a verywell attended Instagram account, and a publishing deal, with a book due out in September — a mix of life story and gardening tips, ‘Gerald-style’.

There are also regular slots on Radio Oxford and on Steph’s Packed Lunch on Channel 4 and constant requests for selfies on the allotment. ‘I was even in the New York Times on Sunday!’ he beams.

To cap all that off, he now has a starring role in a new advertising campaign for the Italian fashion house Gucci, focusing on sustainable fashion, in which he takes some gorgeous Gucci- clad models gardening on a mystery farm in Hertfordshire.

To be fair, he tells me, he has always been interested in clothes and, today, is a vision in top-to-toe pink with contrasting braces.

‘I decided a long time ago that, just because I’m gardening, I wasn’t going to be scruffy,’ he says. ‘Not like someone who’s just come home from work, had their dinner and gone gardening. Why shouldn’t a gardener be dressed for the event?’

Even so, a fashion shoot for one of the top luxury brands in the world must have been quite a stretch.

‘ They whisked him off one night. In a limousine!’ says Liz, who stayed at home to tend the garden and their dog Sky and cat. ‘I was very nervous,’ he says. ‘I’m dyslexic, so not so perfect with the reading. But I’m not really the sort to say “No”, so I said to myself on the way there, “I’m just going to be Gerald, I can’t be anyone else” and bit the bullet and went for it. And it was wonderful! Sometimes just thinking about it makes me feel all funny.’

Of course it does. It must be quite a shock.

It all started a year or so ago when a pal from the allotment recommended Twitter.

‘I’m not technically advanced,’ says Gerald, but a nephew got him going and he and Liz pottered off to the veg patch to find something to tweet about.

‘I think I started with something about my onions,’ he says.

‘Probably,’ says Liz. ‘That sounds about right. You LOVE your onions.’

From then on, Gerald posted a few veggie pictures a week, Liz taking the snaps and him brandishing his home-grown goodies and grinning.

In one, he proudly holds a gigantic carrot with the caption ‘I wish I could send the aroma it’s Devine [sic] cheers’.

In another, he’s holding a celery the size of a suitcase and asking his followers, ‘Now what shall I do with this big boy celery?’

Some people queried his grammar, but he’s having none of it.

‘You don’t need to punctuate,’ he says. ‘It’s not like you’re writing a letter, is it?’

Until May 16, 2020, when he tweeted a couple of before-and-after snaps of his early rocket (a variety of potato) accompanied with ‘my first early rocket very pleased’ and, well, everything went a bit mad.

‘An hour or so later, the phone started tweeting and bleeping and making so many strange noises,’ he says. ‘It wouldn’t shut up. It was really annoying!’ says Liz. ‘ We thought something must be wrong. We barely dared touch it!’

BUT within two days, he had 72,000 likes and 9,000 new followers and, assuming the phone must be faulty, he called in his nephew to sort it out. ‘But there was nothing wrong,’ says Gerald. ‘ He said: “Uncle Gerald, you’ve gone viral with your spuds!” ’

Encouraged, he pressed on, with tomatoes, beans, cabbages, you name it. A few months in and they branched out into short videos.

‘It’s very quick, they take about two minutes,’ he says. ‘ When Gardeners’ World came it took nearly 12 hours to make 20 minutes, but they were very professional.’

One of the most recent, in which Gerald discusses how his runner beans always climb clockwise as Liz holds steady with the smartphone caused a frenzied Twitter debate.

Meanwhile, everyone wants a bit of Gerald. He’s popped up in podcasts everywhere from Canada to the Ukraine — ‘ We haven’t cracked Russia yet!’ Just the other day, the

Alexander McQueen brand sent him a selection of clothes from a new designer gardening range for him to enjoy — ‘nice clobber, too!’

So what’s the appeal? Of course, everything outdoors and wholesome is wildly fashionable right now, but...

‘I think it’s because his posts are always happy,’ says Liz. ‘Because we are happy and he’s always got a smile for everyone.’

‘The past two years the world’s been in a dark place,’ agrees Gerald. ‘Even me and Liz stopped watching the news for a bit — so smiles are very important.’ He also sticks firmly to veg. ‘I won’t get embroiled in any politics or football,’ he says. ‘I just won’t, though I do love watching football.’

‘And cursing and swearing!’ chips in Liz. ‘But that’s private!’ he says. ‘But most of the time I’m a very happy person and content with my lot.’

AND perhaps that’s the nub. After all, isn’t that what we really strive for — not flash clothes or swanky holidays, or slimmer hips, but simple contentment? Particularly when life hasn’t always gone our way. Gerald’s certainly hasn’t. He’s had a slew of jobs, as a butcher, tug driver, hospital porter and trout farmer, an unexpected redundancy (‘I thought it was a job for life’), two divorces (‘I’m not proud I’ve been married twice’) and a nasty bout of prostate cancer nearly six years ago, for which he’s recently had the all-clear.

‘That shook me rigid, but it made me thankful for small mercies,’ he says.

But instead of moaning and mithering, he revels in his garden and his onions and his huge brood of grandchildren and great-grandchildren and the fact that, when his older brother passed away ten years ago, he and Liz — Ralph’s widow, whom Gerald had always secretly admired from afar — fell in love.

‘When Ralph died, I thought: “I’m too old to find companionship again”, but there he was …’ says Liz.

While Gerald couldn’t be more passionate about both horticulture and Liz, until a few years ago, fishing was his first love.

‘If it swam, I wanted to catch it,’ he says. ‘ I had a thing about catching bigger and bigger fish and I think my insatiable appetite for fishing could have had something to do with my divorces.’

Then one day, after he met Liz, he thought: ‘I’ve had enough fishing’, and focused on something they could enjoy together. ‘I think perhaps my obsession with big fish has created my obsession with big veg!’ he says.

But happily, just growing them, rather than properly embracing the notoriously cut-throat world of Big Veg, with its expensively heated poly tunnels, 2am starts, sabotage,

cheating and cut-throat rivalry. ‘They take it to another level. They get quite angry and it doesn’t feel very fun or friendly,’ he says. ‘There was a leek show in Sunderland in 2019 where two 70-year-old blokes came to blows.

‘ I thought: “Oh my, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. Where’s the joy?”’

So, instead, he grows his 3 ft carrots and 6 lb onions for fun and the odd rosette, or 20. (At the last local show he swept the board with 13 firsts, five seconds, three third places and a couple of cups.)

Meanwhile, Liz pickles, bottles and dries, and any gluts go to the local care home.

‘This is true happiness,’ he says, waving his arms at their garden. ‘This is our little bit of heaven.’ It was just when he and Liz thought life couldn’t get any better, that Gucci took them by surprise.

WHEN he was first contacted by the PRs about a collaboration, he assumed it was a wind up.

‘Liz and I have got this twoseater recliner and we were crashed out on it and I said: “Look at this, Liz. Somebody’s having a laugh”.’

But he was wrong — ‘Apparently they liked my approach to recycling!’ — and soon they were embroiled in Zoom meetings. ‘I was thinking: “What’s going on? I’m not an actor!”’

‘ You’re not a model, either!’ laughs Liz.

Whatever, within weeks he was off to star in his first international fashion campaign.

‘They treated me like royalty and told me I was the star of the show. They even gave me my own dressing room and hot water bottle to keep.

‘And the models! They were lovely — but so thin and shivering and none of them ate anything and just smoked, instead. But by the end we were all just mates together. Ah, it was a wonderful experience.’

Today Gerald and Liz are in a welcome lull until the full Gucci ad is released — there is a 30- second taster online — and the madness of the book launch in September.

So they’re busy planting out cauliflowers and multi- headed sunflowers, admiring tomatoes the size of fists, trying not to get too excited about a possible collaboration with a compost supplier and doggedly answering all his Twitter queries.

‘It takes me up to five hours a day, but if they’ve been polite enough to get in touch . . .’ he says.

After all that, a largely veggiebased dinner — ‘We’re almost completely self-sufficient’ — and a nice cup of tea, they sit side by side on their recliner and marvel at their good fortune. ‘We just look at each other and say, this is a dream, a total dream,’ says Gerald. ‘Though maybe it’s come at the wrong end of our lives.’

Or perhaps this is the perfect time to really enjoy it and not be too wowed by all the fuss. I certainly have never met a nicer, more deserving pair.

‘I’d never let his head be turned!’ says Liz, firmly.

She needn’t worry. Gerald just isn’t the sort for airs and graces. neither of them are. As he puts it himself: ‘I’m not special. I’m not famous. Somebody who breaks the fourminute mile, or gets into a rocket and goes to the Moon, that’s famous. Gerald Stratford, he’s just a gardener who’s made a few people happy.’

Belmooney

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2021-06-12T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-12T07:00:00.0000000Z

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