It is easy to forget that Elliott Rogers is blind. The 12-year-old Young Blind Gardener of the Year does a good job of convincing you that he is not.

As he navigates his way through the corridors, playgrounds and car parks at Impington Village College to his school garden, Elliott warns his teaching assistant to watch out for the minibus careering towards them before she even sees it coming. But it is when he reaches the greenhouse and plot of land where he feeds birds, makes ponds and plants bulbs that his eyes begin to sparkle.

“You can do whatever you like – it’s not like being in lessons where you have to scribble things down on paper,” he says, rubbing his hands in the cold. He comes to the garden every day, “unless it’s absolutely pouring down”, and finds his way around using strategically placed wind chimes and his mind’s eye, after memorising the layout of the benches and sheds using a tactile map.

“I like getting messy,” he says, trudging across the grass in his muddied trainers. He is particularly keen on wildlife, and worms are his favourites. “I like how they feel and I can dig holes and get all dirty. I also like being out in the sunshine and learning new things about plants.”

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Elliott, who lives in Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire, has Crouzon syndrome, a genetic condition that affects the way the skull grows. An operation to enlarge his skull and prevent his brain from becoming squashed caused him to lose his sight when he was 5. But, encouraged by his parents, he still uses the language of a sighted person because that’s how the world speaks. “He will say, ‘I can see you looking sad,’ because he’s picked up other signs that suggest you are sad,” Claire Royston, his mother, says.

Elliott has been gardening since he was little. He suspects that Tracy Chapman, his teaching assistant at the college – a mainstream school with a special needs department – had nominated him for Young Blind Gardener of the Year, which is awarded by Thrive, one of the charities supported by this year’s Times Christmas appeal, and the Royal National Institute of Blind People. “I walked into school and she looked really smug – like she’d done something.”

He did not tell his parents straight away that he had won. “I kept it quiet.” But after radio appearances and an award ceremony in London he enjoys reminding his four able-bodied, high-achieving siblings that he is the only one among them to have won a national award.

“It’s given him status among his siblings,” his mother says, “and it’s given him self-assurance. He can say, ‘I’m not a poor person with a disability, I’ve got something to offer’. He’s got a real talent for gardening and it’s made him think about what he wants to be.”

The future is something that, at one time, his family did not consider, having faced two occasions when he was expected to die.

As well as growing vegetables, Elliott uses his gardening skills to plant and sell tubs of flowers. “He’s putting his prices up now because he’s an award winner,” his mother says.

As part of the prize, Elliott receives a year’s free membership of Thrive, which helps disabled people of all ages to benefit from gardening. “I got some vouchers and some money and I’m going to buy a hedgehog house, a mushroom log and some plants for the school garden,” Elliott says.

The Thrive and RNIB judges were impressed by Elliott’s use of compost and recycling. He has made a birdbath out of an old dog bowl and regularly tops up the bird feeder with seed. Has he seen many birds? “No,” he says. “They come when I’m not here.”