British botanist James Wong broke into TV in his twenties with the BBC series Grow Your Own Drugs, and although he’s gone on to be an award-winning garden designer and best-selling author of several plant-rearing books, he remains frustrated with the British gardening world. It’s fixated, he says, on catering to “people with big hair, small dogs, and posh accents.”
Wong, 42, hails from a working-class immigrant family. He has 500 houseplants, including numerous terrariums he grooms with a tweezer. But he says that a show about his own gardening style wasn’t enticing Britain’s fusty TV commissioners, to say nothing of the travelogue he wanted to make about urban flora in Singapore, where he spent his childhood. “I thought, If there’s really no opportunity to do that in print media or on television, I can make it myself.”
City in Nature, his “mini doc” series that debuted in January on Instagram to his quarter-million followers, crams breathtaking vistas of Singaporean biodiversity into 90-second Reels. Wong produced all eight episodes solo—aided by self-taught local filmmakers Beixin Lee and Robin Lam, whom he met randomly on, yes, Instagram. (Their only communication before Wong arrived at Changi Airport was via WhatsApp. “I thought, What if they don’t turn up?” he jokes. “I had never seen pictures of their faces, and their feed was just landscapes.”)
The trio began exploring and documenting—more nimbly than a larger crew would have—the urban green spaces that have transformed the island into the world’s most biodiverse capital city, capturing everything from a seven-story waterfall that drops from an indoor oculus, to three acres of elevated jungle sprouting from a hotel and a vast rewilding project snaking through the city’s heart, elements that Wong says trace back to the garden city movement the Brits pioneered a century ago, then “forgot about.” (Three episodes were partially funded by the Singapore Tourism Board.)
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