US Edition 
Meet the gardeners blossoming on social media
A generation of hip young gardeners is bringing horticulture to the kids
In this age of instant gratification and short attention spans, it’s a surprise that gardening is enjoying a renaissance among the young.
A survey by the Royal Horticultural Society found that 89 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds say they have a garden or grow plants. And looking around, it’s easy to find evidence for this new breed of youngster that digs digging.
The most recent series of the BBC’s Big Allotment Challenge featured its youngest ever contestant, a 21-year-old graduate with a hipster haircut and regulation NHS specs. Matt Kaczmarczyk, from Northolt, north-west London, explained that he’d been obsessed with growing his own vegetables since the age of 9 after rescuing a tomato plant from his neighbour’s dustbin.
Jamie Oliver also knows the benefit of getting children into the green-fingered habit and is spearheading a new campaign to ensure every child is taught how to grow their own food.
The twentysomethings who scuttle about on allotments or in mum and dad’s urban garden, are turning to Twitter and YouTube before reaching for their trowel. British teenager Jack Shilley’s YouTube video entitled “planting raspberries in containers” has been viewed more than 20,000 times.
So what has persuaded the PlayStation generation of the joys of growing peonies and parsley?
Jamie Butterworth is 20 and grew up in Wakefield, west Yorkshire. He dresses sharply, talks with pride and affection about his hobby, and was a finalist in the BBC’s Young Gardener of the Year. If the new movement needs a poster boy, Jamie is your man.
He recalls the precise moment he fell in love with the idea of a day outdoors in the company of some seeds, a spade and the smell of damp soil.
“I distinctly remember at about 9 sowing my first packet of seeds. It was only cornflowers. But the excitement I felt when I saw them grow and flower… I couldn’t get over the fact that something that beautiful had come from a packet of seeds that cost 20p from Asda. That, to me, was amazing. And it still is.”
This message is echoed by others. Take Dale Connelly. He’s a 27-year-old Essex boy with a builder dad and a dress sense that takes in baseball caps (worn backwards, naturally), a stubbly beard and plenty of hair gel. Three years ago, he’d “never picked up a spade”. Then his brother Lee moved out of home, and the two siblings wanted to find an activity they could do together to ensure they kept in touch. So they rented an allotment from the council.
Now Dale and his brother Lee have gone into business together as the “Skinny Jean Gardeners”. They’ve been drafted in to do the gardening for TV farmer Jimmy Doherty – and they’re also the in-house horticulturalists on the BBC’s Blue Peter programme.
The world has moved on from Percy Thrower, says Dale. “Young people are really getting into gardening – because they’re realising it’s not a chore, it’s fun.”
He adds: “There have been too many stereotypes about gardens and gardeners. A windowsill can be a garden. You don’t need a 200ft garden. However you look at it, if you’re planting something outside your window, that is gardening. We can complicate gardening too much – young people are simplifying it, and stripping it back.”
The only reason it’s taken time, he says, for young people to latch on to gardening is that it’s had an image problem. And that’s largely down to television. Two names loom large: Alan Titchmarsh and Monty Don.
Like almost all the young gardeners I spoke to for this piece, Connelly pays tribute to the skill of the TV gardeners. But only in order to delicately plant a metaphorical spade in the back of their heads.
He says: “The thing is that people like Alan Titchmarsh and Monty Don are fantastic gardeners, and they give out great advice. But a lot of what they do is about looking pretty, Young people want to use what they grow in the garden in their cooking, or even in other ways – did you know you can make shampoo out of lemon thyme. That’s what’s really exciting.”
Butterworth agrees. He too points a muddy finger in the direction of the the nation’s best-known horticulturalists.
“If you turn on Gardeners’ World on a Friday evening, you get Monty Don in his tweed jacket, cutting his beech hedge, and doing this and that in terracotta pots. It’s very easy to think: ‘How boring. My grandad does gardening, I want to do something much cooler’ But horticulture is amazing and so exciting.”
Kitty Wilkins, a 28-year-old student who lives in York, agrees that her passion has an image problem among the young – though she blames the terracotta more than the TV folk. She grows rocket, parsley, redcurrants, blueberries and peas in the courtyard of the house she rents on the outskirts of the city.
“The problem has been that garden centres have always sold a twee pastiche of gardening – terracotta pots that are supposed to look like they come from 15th-century Italy. Naff stuff that’s aimed at the fiftysomething market. But in the last five years there are lot more companies creating things a bit cooler: cleaner lines, more modern and fashionable.”
In their social lives, too, young people are exposed to gardening in a way that wouldn’t have happened a few years back: “It’s becoming more trendy. Now you might see a raised planting bed on the rooftop of a bar when you go out drinking. And I know pubs where they have pick your own herbs for your lunch. It’s little things like that that young people might appreciate.”
They’re also keen to grow their own food – particularly stuff you can’t get at the supermarket, such as land seaweed (excellent in stir fries, apparently) and “stained-glass” corn - sweetcorn in which each of the semi-transparent kernels is a different colour. Or how about some edible “electric daisies”, which give the sensation of a mild electric shock when you chew them?
Dale Connelly, one of the Skinny Jean Gardeners, left, with farmer Jimmy Doherty
But, laughs Kitty, “this year I’m also trying to grow some more cut flowers, because I seem to have become more girly recently.”
The choice of plant isn’t always the central issue. No matter what age you are, there’s something rewarding about taking in the fresh air and sitting back, waiting for nature to perform its little miracles. In a world where schoolteachers, bosses, parents and partners want instant results, it can be nice to work to a more generous timeframe.
And as Jamie Butterworth says: “You can be as creative and imaginative as you like. But you also know that if you get it wrong, it’s not the end of the world. You’re growing in compost, not concrete. It’s not like you’re an architect making a building, you can just do it again. And that’s the fun of gardening for me.”