On James Wong’s website he describes himself as a professional plant geek, broadcaster and bestselling author. The unbuttoned ‘plant geek’ label is typical of James’s desire to communicate with as many people as possible, to open eyes to the importance of plants and the wonder of gardening.
“Botanist most accurately describes what I am,” he explains, “but the trouble is, most people don’t know what botanists are. Ethnobotany, which is half anthropology and half botany, is what I understand best. There are lots of botanists who have never planted a seed, they just know what it looks under a microscope, but an ethnobotanist has to understand how to use plants, where they come from, how they can be grown and harvested. You also need to be able to go to a rural market in the mountains of Ecuador, as I have done, and go up to people and ask them all about the herbs they’re selling.”
"There are lots of botanists who have never planted a seed, they just know what it looks under a microscope."
One of James’s favourite adages is ‘desire plus frustration equals obsession’ and an early example of his love affair with plants is when, as a five-year-old growing up in Singapore, he was sent a packet of mixed seeds by his Welsh grandmother that included snapdragons. “The plants came up in half the time they said on the packet and I thought ‘I’m a genius’. But it was really because I was growing temperate plants in tropical conditions. They all got fungal disease and collapsed. I was so frustrated by the vision I had of flowers snapping at each other that I decided to try again, this time putting them in the fridge and opening the air conditioning vents.”
James’s ‘bible’ growing up was DG Hessayon’s The Houseplant Expert. Not only did it show him how to make his first terrarium, it also identified the plants that were growing next to his bus stop. Indoor gardening became an escape (his family lived in an apartment without a garden), which it still is, though his refuge now is a one-bedroom London flat, which is crammed with more than 500 plants.
“The fact that I only have tiny amounts of space and that most houseplants need to grow within two metres of a window, has meant I’ve had to do things like experiment with grow lights, bonsai and water lilies in fruit bowls. That’s the exciting thing about horticulture for me: it’s like a detective puzzle. I think many people are put off horticulture because there are rules that you have to memorise and if you don’t, everything will die. We should just tell people there are different tips and tricks. They may not work for everyone – actually a whole bunch of Victorian ones are rubbish – but go ahead and experiment with different things and see what happens.”
"That’s the exciting thing about horticulture for me: it’s like a detective puzzle."
James, who came to the UK to go to university in 1999 and then completed a MSc in ethnobotany with distinction, shares his indoor garden with some 245,000 followers on Instagram and has become an energetic advocate of social media. “I used to be quite dismissive of Instagram because I thought it was all about people taking pictures of themselves on holiday, in various stages of undress,” he says. As well as posting most days on his own account, he spends several hours a week checking out others. “I think it’s really opening up a new world. I’ve learned things about horticulture I would never have learned in a million years from traditional media.”
He mentions a Japanese account (@Michikusa3193) dedicated to making tiny moss gardens inside glass cases, which he tries to re-create, and another that shows weeds growing in cracks in the pavement (@botaworks). “I find it fascinating to see the Japanese aesthetic of appreciating a weed growing in a pavement crack, how they take the photo, what they choose to include, which plants are growing.”
"I find it fascinating to see the Japanese aesthetic of appreciating a weed growing in a pavement crack."
He’s encouraged by the surge in interest in houseplants from younger people, and although lack of home ownership may be part of the reason, he feels there’s a more complex explanation. Partly it’s about control: the kind of houseplants they are interested in are not necessarily the easy-to-care-for ones, they’re the rare and unusual, and often expensive ones. And partly it’s because people are looking to plants to improve their mental health. The hashtags from these new converts are about caring, nurturing, making people happy.
Anyone who owns a book by James – he’s written six so far, all of them bestsellers – will know how thoroughly researched and packed full of accessible information they are. When he was writing James Wong’s Homegrown Revolution he knew he wanted to test all of the hundreds of unusual edibles but didn’t have access to a field site or a greenhouse. Instead he grew them in his mother’s front garden in Croydon. “I could only get there once a week, which I was worried about, but then I found out that I was replicating how other people were growing at home. So, I can’t tell you how to grow tomatoes in a greenhouse, but I can tell you how to grow them if you can’t afford one.” And because he has his finger on the pulse of scientific discovery, he continues to be the ideal person to share findings, whether through his online courses, journalism, broadcasting or social media.
USEFUL INFORMATION Find out more about James at jameswong.co.uk and follow him on Instagram @botanygeek
Listen to James discuss his dream garden on our podcast Talking Gardens.