Gerald Stratford Knows How to Garden

His quiet life in England brought fame. He wasn’t asking for it.

Gerald Stratford’s big vegetables and ordinary life changed with a tweet. He posted two pictures of himself wearing a red T-shirt and matching pants held up by thick blue suspenders in May 2020. In the first photograph he’s standing and holding a giant bundle of rocket — or arugula as it’s called in the United States — and in the other the 72-year-old sits on an upside-down bucket with a bowl of potatoes. He’s smiling like a small child with still pudgy cheeks, shining with a little glow. “My phone started, bleeping and buzzing and making all sorts of noises, and, to be honest, I didn’t know what was going on,” Mr. Stratford said in a Zoom call. “And so I found my nephew, who’s pretty switched on to computers and he came back to me a few minutes later on the phone and said, ‘You’ve gone viral with your spuds.’ Now, I even had to ask him what viral was.”