Urban Nature Recovery with The Cloud Gardener: Small Spaces, Big Ideas, and Unequal Outcomes

In this episode, Jason Williams , better known as The Cloud Gardener, shares how a lockdown balcony became a haven for biodiversity and wellbeing, leading him to the Chelsea Flower Show and a Churchill Fellowship exploring greener cities around the world.

Later, researchers Martha Crockatt and Mattia Troiano talk to Raphaella Mascia and discuss their Oxford-based work on equity of access to green space, and how social, economic and spatial inequalities shape who benefits from urban nature.

Together they reflect on what makes city greening succeed and who might be left behind.

Highlights

• 00:00 — Welcome and introductions
• 01:00 — Jason’s balcony story: lockdown gardening, biodiversity, and mental health
• 04:00 — From social media to show gardens and Chelsea Flower Show
• 08:00 — Lessons from Milan, Singapore and China: community vs private greening
• 12:00 — The challenges of “sterile balcony” policies and access for renters
• 15:00 — Greening Manchester’s alleyways and working with local communities
• 19:00 — Martha & Mattia introduce their research on Oxford’s green spaces
• 24:00 — Findings: small spaces, inequitable access, and local governance
• 31:00 — Art & Nature in The Leys: community engagement through art
• 36:00 — Reflections on interdisciplinary collaboration and next steps

Resources & links

The Cloud Gardener

Community Values in Accessible Urban Green Spaces (Project)

Art and Nature in The Leys (Event)

Learn more about the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery: naturerecovery.ox.ac.uk

The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners.

The views, opinions and positions expressed within this podcast are those of the speakers alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, or its researchers.

The work of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is made possible thanks to the support of the Leverhulme Trust.

Transcript

Stephen Thomas
Welcome to the Nature Recovery Podcast. We're going to take a closer look at some of the solutions to counter biodiversity decline, and we'll find out more about the people behind these ideas.

Martha Crockatt
Hi, I'm Martha.

Raphaella Mascia
Hi, I'm Ella.

Mattia Troiano
Hi, I'm Matti, and welcome to this Nature Recovery Podcast.

Raphaella Mascia
What are we going to be talking about today, guys?

Martha Crockatt
Well, we're going to start off with me talking to Jason Williams — the Cloud Gardener. He's going to talk about his work in urban green spaces in cities across the world.

Raphaella Mascia
That sounds great.

Raphaella Mascia
And then we're going to follow that with me interviewing the two of you about urban green spaces in Oxford.

Mattia Troiano
Brilliant. Then let's get started.

Martha Crockatt
Jason, I think it would be really interesting for people to hear about your background — what's brought you to the place you are now.

Jason Williams
Yeah. I used to be in hospitality. I shared last night that I was a general manager at the good old Slug and Lettuce in Manchester. I wasn't really interested in gardening until I moved into my apartment in 2020. During lockdown I began to appreciate having outside space. I bought plants from B&Q and they weren't working in my space — it took time to learn the nuances of balcony gardening.

I ended up creating my own balcony garden after a lot of trial and error. A lot of gardening media focuses on big stately homes; I was trying to replicate that and it didn't work for my space. I had to rip up the rule book and make my own rules — and I found success.

Martha Crockatt
Brilliant. And then you started sharing this on social media — how did you go from gardening for yourself to sharing it publicly?

Jason Williams
Boredom — lockdown gave me time away from hospitality. Has anyone here worked in hospitality? (everyone chuckles) It's great fun but really draining, especially in management — 50–60 hour weeks, always delivering profit, which was a big source of stress for me. While furloughed, I realised part of my anxiety and depression came from overwork. When I reclaimed my time I discovered gardening.

It took a lot to make my first video. My very first YouTube video was "How to grow bare-root lupins from Wilko's" — and it's still one of my most popular videos four years on. My channel became an outlet to share wins and fails in the garden and to talk about mental health and how gardening helped me. I thought no one would care about my little balcony garden, but it snowballed.

My balcony is about 7 metres long and 1.5 metres wide. I have three ponds — an edible pond, a sensory pond, and a fish pond — and I grow tomatoes, peppers, kales, cucumbers, melons, passion fruit, limes and lots of herbs. It's busy — real biodiversity in a small space.

Martha Crockatt
That's a busy, impressive space — biodiversity in a small area. You’ve also done a Churchill Fellowship — but before that, tell us about your passion for sharing the benefits of greening small spaces with others.

Jason Williams
It started with my show garden career — something I never thought I'd say five years ago. I went to the Chelsea Flower Show in 2021 when they first included balcony and container gardens. The show gardens are works of art, but I wanted to show something based in reality. I submitted an application to Chelsea to show what a real balcony garden looks like.

Part of my design and application talked about how gardening positively affected my mental health. I'm an ambassador for the charity Thrive in Reading — volunteers helped build the garden and were with me during show week to illustrate how gardening helps mental health. When I look at all the buildings in Manchester with balconies, I think how many people could benefit from this if they knew how. My social media aim is to convert balconies into green spaces — not just for wildlife but for people’s mental health. In many developments there is no balcony space at all, or no green space at the base; people miss out.

Martha Crockatt
You're partway through a Churchill Fellowship to visit very green cities across Europe and Asia to bring ideas back to Manchester. What have you discovered — what could be transferred to the UK?

Jason Williams
I applied for a Churchill Fellowship as a research grant and chose Milan, Barcelona, China and Singapore. I was meant to be gone eight weeks but ended up spending four and a half months.

In Milan I visited Bosco Verticale — two residential towers where every apartment has a balcony full of plants (about 10,000 shrubs and plants between the towers). It’s a stunning building and an often-cited example of urban greening. But the apartments are extremely expensive — two-bedroom rents were around €2,500–3,000 a month — so it's effectively for the wealthy. More interesting to me was the park at the base of the development, run in partnership with the developer and the Milan government: a community-focused park with allotments and event space. That community element is something I'd love to see more of in the UK — why aren't local councils working with developers to create these spaces?

Martha Crockatt
That links to questions about green gentrification. You mentioned greening ginnels in Manchester. On private balconies anyone can grow what they want — is that true?

Jason Williams
Not always. Many developers include clauses in rental agreements that restrict what you can do on balconies. Some developments have a "sterile balcony" policy disallowing any growing, sometimes citing fire risk. Many restrictions are actually about avoiding conflicts between residents who might not like the look of someone’s balcony garden. In my development there's some resistance, though my garden ended up being good publicity for them. When I do consultations, the first thing I tell people is to check the weight limit of their balcony — compost and water add weight, and container type matters. My balcony is effectively an extension of the flat and sits on concrete, so it can hold a lot. Many balconies are clipped on at the edge and have much stricter limits.

Martha Crockatt
In terms of equity and green gentrification — do you see greening leading to rising house prices and pushing out the people who would most benefit?

Jason Williams
Yes. In Manchester there's a pattern with back-to-back terraced housing where alleyways at the rear can be transformed from fly-tipping zones into gardens. I did a show garden in 2024 (an alleyway garden) and rehomed it to Moss Side — an underprivileged area. I worked with the community for a year and it’s been interesting to see landlords respond positively; they’ve begun to associate the area with the garden and engage more. That was a positive — they are starting to include themselves in the space.

But in policy terms the UK is behind. Singapore and parts of China have comprehensive planning. In Singapore the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) has an urban exhibition that shows their planning from start to finish. They target being about fifteen minutes from a green space, build connectors and cycle ways to nature reserves, and make developers accountable for roof gardening and community gardening. Singapore followed a plan and turned it into reality — they’ve become one of the wealthiest places partly through planning. In China I visited botanical gardens and saw Victorian-style gardens influenced by UK horticulture — it struck me that we’re not treating horticulture with the same strategic importance. The takeaway was that we need policy change to deliver greening that benefits everyone and avoid tick-box exercises.

Raphaella Mascia
Hi, thank you so much for joining the Leverhulme Centre Nature Recovery Podcast. Would you introduce yourselves and say what your roles are and what research you do?

Mattia Troiano
Hi — my name's Mati. I'm a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute (ECI). My work is part of my project in Environmental Change and Management based at the School of Geography and the Environment, and has grown into a longer project in collaboration with Martha.

Martha Crockatt
I'm Martha Crockatt. I'm a researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery. My research focuses on equity of access to green space.

Raphaella Mascia
Could you describe the research project you collaborated on related to green spaces in Oxfordshire?

Martha Crockatt
I'll start: I joined the Leverhulme Centre after questions from the local county council about equity of access to green space. We know there are health benefits from being in green space and we want everyone to share those benefits. I did a desk-based project using public data to identify small neighbourhood areas that lacked access to green space and were socio-economically deprived. "Green space" here includes parks, local woodlands, cemeteries, footpaths beside canals — a whole range of types — and it’s also important to consider how “green” a neighbourhood feels (percentage of man-made surfaces). If your neighbourhood is wall-to-wall concrete, you miss those incidental interactions with green space.

I produced a report identifying priority neighbourhoods in Oxfordshire for councils and community groups to prioritise for improvements and funding.

Mattia Troiano
Martha’s work inspired me during my MPhil. I became interested in the valuation of nature in urban green spaces — a different logic from rural valuation. My overarching question was: how equitable are urban green spaces in Oxford beyond simple spatial distribution? I did a qualitative piece, engaging three communities in north Oxford: Summertown and St Margaret’s Neighbourhood Forum, Headington Neighbourhood Forum, and Blackbellies parish area. These communities vary socio-economically and in green space provision. I conducted semi-structured, walked interviews in people’s preferred or nearest green spaces to understand why they value these spaces and what needs or values they seek when visiting them.

We then tried to blend the quantitative spatial analysis with qualitative findings to create a richer understanding.

Raphaella Mascia
What did you learn — what were your findings?

Martha Crockatt
I learned a lot. The basic point is that benefiting from green space is more complex than simply having it available. Distribution matters — if the green space isn’t there you can’t benefit — but having green space is not sufficient on its own. Since publishing the report many organisations contacted us. Identifying priority neighbourhoods has helped focus funding and policy attention.

In the three communities Matty looked at, the most socio-economically deprived areas did not necessarily have the least absolute green space, but because of high population density they had less accessible green space per person, lower provision of private gardens, and a higher percentage of man-made surfaces. People in these areas often have less say in how green spaces are governed and less time to contribute to upkeep. So it’s a “perfect storm”: less green space to start with and less access to governance of those spaces.

Mattia Troiano
From interviews across the three different neighbourhoods we found shared values — for example a sense of wellbeing and escape from the city — but they expressed that value differently. For more deprived communities the park was a place to escape material and financial worries. In less deprived or professional communities green space was often a break from work and had an aesthetic, sensorial value.

On governance and participation, mainstream consultation processes can overlook important social constraints. Councils and institutions are not “evil”, but the social landscape is complex. When designing consultation we need to acknowledge differences between communities and create mitigation strategies so everyone can participate — e.g. consider the cost of time, differences in free time available, and feelings of marginalisation that discourage engagement.

Raphaella Mascia
Based on these findings, what is the future of your work? How are you continuing to share what you learned and feed it back to communities?

Martha Crockatt
One thing to mention is an event Matty secured funding for — we ran it together in Blackbellies (the area Matty researched). We held an art-and-nature event that was free for the local community. There were arts activities and I ran participatory mapping: we gave people maps to mark green spaces they liked and what they valued. Hearing people's personal connections was great and the event was a good way to surface values.

Mattia Troiano
At the same event we ran an arts-based urban green space making activity. I used arts methods alongside the walked interviews to visually convey the values people voiced. Words sometimes fail to capture lived experience; drawings can represent values and memories that verbal descriptions don’t. We asked people to represent their “ideal” green space — adults often drew spaces rooted in memories, while children imagined longer-term, futuristic spaces. The event became a catalyst: it created conversation between local parish councillors and a newly formed "Friends of the Park" group for Spindleberry Park (in Blackbellies). The activity provided a platform for people who wouldn't normally be in the same room to exchange ideas.

Martha Crockatt
Collaborating with Matty has been great. It's my first proper interdisciplinary research where social sciences and natural sciences have come together. The findings are stronger for it. It hasn't always been straightforward — we had some intense conversations and lots of drawing — but it's been worth it. Natural and social scientists sometimes speak different languages, but together it's more than the sum of the parts. We hope the published paper will be valuable.

Mattia Troiano
I echo Martha. Working across disciplines helped us design better dissemination strategies to influence policy and other stakeholders. We're dealing with people’s daily lives — wellbeing and policy are deeply entwined — and interdisciplinary work improves our ability to have real-world impact. I've learned a lot and will carry the approach into my future research. Others should aim to work across disciplinary lenses too.

Stephen Thomas
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If you want to find out more about the activities of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, visit our website: www.naturerecovery.ox.ac.uk
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Thanks so much for listening.