Titouan Bernicot doesn't grow tomatoes, he grows the ‘rainforest of the sea’, one coral at a time

There was, in my mind, only one kind of gardener. They feature in this magazine; cultivating, planting and maintaining various acres of this green and pleasant land. Always on land. But then I met Titouan Bernicot.

Titouan gardens in a wetsuit off the coast of French Polynesia. He doesn’t grow tomatoes, tulips or trees, but organisms that predate the dinosaurs by 250 million years. His crop is coral.

Titouan’s horticultural career did begin on dry land: ‘I had my tomatoes, a little lettuce and stuff,’ he says. But, aged 16, when he was surfing over a bleached and dying reef, he discovered the crop that will likely consume the rest of his life.

Coral reefs are the ocean's great overachievers — they cover less than 1% of the ocean floor, yet shelter a quarter of all marine life and provide food security and livelihoods for more than one billion people. They also act as natural breakwaters, underpin tourism economies and, rather importantly, produce a substantial share of the oxygen we breathe; Titouan, who describes the reefs as ‘rainforests of the sea’, puts it at more than half globally.

Humanity has a nasty habit of ruining the most useful parts of the natural world and reefs are no exception. Live-coral cover has roughly halved since the 1950s and we are currently experiencing the aftermath of the worst mass-bleaching event on record: between January 2023 and March 2025, heat stress hit 84% of reefs across 82 countries. Rising ocean temperatures is the primary driver, compounded by pollution, coastal development, overfishing and coral-eating starfish outbreaks. The economic case for acting now is stark. Unchecked coral loss could cost $500 billion a year by 2100, against a fraction of that to protect ocean health today. There is a simpler, more urgent case too: our own survival. ‘No reef, no ocean, no air,’ concludes Titouan.

The environmentalist was still a teenager when he founded Coral Gardeners, which restores reefs by growing coral in underwater nurseries — mostly on suspended rope structures — before transplanting mature fragments back onto degraded reefs. Rather than rushing the polyps into deeper water, the organisation deliberately lets them mature for up to two years in the nursery, prioritising resilience, species diversity and connectivity so the restored reef can function as a genuine ecosystem. ‘Nature loves diversity — a resilient reef has a lot of different coral species, not just one,’ says Titouan.

Since 2017, the company has planted 221,212 corals across 103 species and restored 25,100 square metres of reef — 20 Olympic swimming pools' worth — across 12 active sites in French Polynesia, Fiji and Thailand. And the team’s patience pays off: despite 2024's catastrophic bleaching event, their corals have maintained an average survival rate above 80%. The team combines hands-on gardening with in-house scientific research (CG Labs), AI-powered monitoring tools and partnerships with brands and institutions to fund the work and raise public awareness of reef decline. ‘We know restoration alone can't save reefs at the rate we're losing them,’ he says, ‘which is why we focus also on storytelling and building a movement, since real change starts when people understand how much we depend on the ocean.’

I visited Coral Gardeners' headquarters on Mo'orea a few years ago. It is not a subtle island. Nature does not so much exist as loom large in high definition. It is an earthly paradise, its soaring volcanic peaks iced head to toe in spongy vegetation. On moodier days, clouds snag in the steep crevices and raindrops the size of marbles plip-plop off palm fronds and pool inside hibiscus plants. The air becomes so thick with moisture you swear you can feel and hold it in your mouth. The people I met described how ocean water runs in Polynesians’ veins and that it’s not uncommon for older fishermen to ask for a shark’s permission before taking fish from their feeding grounds. It is, in other words, precisely the sort of place that produces people like Titouan.

There is, tucked away on page 44 of Coral Gardeners' latest report, a single sentence that ought to have made rather more noise than it has. In June, at the United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice, the President of French Polynesia announced that his government would formally recognise ‘coral gardener’ as an official profession. On the face of it, it is a bureaucratic footnote. In practice, it is rather extraordinary: an environmental NGO, founded by someone not yet 30, has effectively willed a new career into existence by government decree.

Buried a few pages later is something else. On the atoll of Ahe, Titouan’s team repurposed the ropes of a defunct pearl farm — his family's trade — to grow coral instead, with growth rates nearly 20 times the original volume in under a year. Meanwhile, in Italy, the same methodology developed for tropical acropora (a genus of small polyp stony coral) is now tentatively being trialled on cold-water Mediterranean gorgonians (colonial soft corals).

You'd assume a coral-restoration project in French Polynesia and the great houses of Italian fashion and Swiss watchmaking would have little to say to each other. You'd be wrong. In nine years, more than 500 companies have come knocking, wanting to attach their name to Coral Gardeners. Titouan turns most of them away.

His filtering process is, to put it politely, unsentimental. He wants evidence of homework done before a single penny changes hands; partners who have ‘properly started even before our discussion to build a CSR (corporate social responsibility strategy) with some tangible goals’ — and, crucially, ‘not just giving us some financial support for us to do the thing.’

There are two big names who cleared the bar. Rolex and Prada Group. The watchmaker — who Titouan speaks of with something close to reverence, calling them ‘our North Star’ — has backed Coral Gardeners, via its Perpetual Planet Initiative, since near its inception. Earlier thsi month, the President of French Polynesia visited Coral Gardeners' headquarters earlier this month and joined the team underwater to inspect the nurseries. The moment was caught on camera by CNN for Call to Earth, the cable news networks's multi-platform editorial series that exposes some of the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. It launched in 2021 in partnership with Rolex.

Prada, in partnership with UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, is helping to fund Titouan’s projects in the Mediterranean. He singles out the luxury fashion house's Re-Nylon collection, spun from recycled fishing nets. ‘Introducing nylon into [high] fashion is bold,’ he says, ‘but using recycled fishing net nylon’ — and sustaining it for years, as one of the label's bestsellers — is ‘brilliant.’

It would be easy to mistake all this for greedy ambition. However, Titouan doesn’t even consider himself a custodian of the reef, much less so its keeper. ‘The reef has given me everything in my life,’ he says, ‘so I want to give back… nature is not something we own, but something we live in harmony with.’ The billion-dollar question is whether it’s a philosophy that scales to planetary emergency. Titouan might be our and the ocean’s only hope, and the closest thing gardening has to a creed.