‘I’m giving people a happy space’: the man clearing gardens for free – and letting light into strangers’ lives
When he saw a messy yard being criticised on social media, Stephen Jalland grabbed his trimmer and decided to help. An overgrown garden, he discovered, often hides an overwhelmed owner
Anita Thursby had been dreading the gas engineer coming to service her boiler. They would have needed to enter her kitchen, where the window looked into the jungle of swirling, 2-metre-high brambles that made up her back garden, and her shame had spiralled. “I would have been horrified,” she says. For the same reason, the 54-year-old had stopped inviting friends over to her house and had been living in fear of a complaint from her housing association.
Maintaining the garden had slipped from her grasp, becoming a source of constant worry, yet pride had stopped her asking for help – and tight finances from paying for it. Family barbecues had become a distant memory, even though she longed to have her 83-year-old mother round to sit in the sun; weeks ago, she bought a grill in Tesco with little hope of ever using it.
Stephen Jalland nods as she explains all this. Sweat, from the exertion of hacking through the weeds clawing at Thursby’s bungalow, is running down his face. His arms are crisscrossed with old scratches and the ruby-red blood of new ones, smearing into sticky blackberry-juice stains.
Thursby describes Jalland as “family”, but in truth they met just days ago. That was when he arrived to start clearing her garden for nothing – an act of generosity he has performed for about a dozen people with similarly overgrown outside spaces since launching a “free mows” service on Facebook in June.
“I really don’t think you understand how much difference you make to people,” Thursby tells him, bringing coffee amid moldering vegetation and a thick fug of petrol fumes from his trimmer. “Demons have been going in my head over this,” she adds, gazing at the partly cleared space. “Instantly, the weight is gone off my shoulders.”
Jalland nods again. “That’s what we’re aiming for,” he says, gruffly. And it is that matter-of-factness for which she is most grateful. Jalland, 57, did not blink when he arrived. “There was no judgment at all,” she says. “He said: ‘Come on, let’s have a look.’”
But it is judgment that has led Jalland to Thursby’s garden, not far from his own home in the Cambridgeshire town of March. More specifically, the realisation that there is too much of it in the world. “I was pissed off with people’s attitudes,” he says. It all started one afternoon in June when, finding himself with time on his hands as his new handyman business struggled to pick up work, he scrolled through a community Facebook group and noticed a post about an overgrown lawn. “Here was an anonymous person having a go about somebody’s garden, how people should take pride in where they live … You know, really having a go, not knowing their situation.”
His reaction was instinctive: “Give me the address and I’m going to go down there and cut the grass.” Someone messaged him the address privately, he says, and he immediately “got off my ass”. When he arrived and offered his help, the man thanked him, then began to explain why his garden was as it was. “He was a single bloke living with his son and had various health problems. When his mower broke, he couldn’t afford to replace it.”
Jalland spent two hours cutting the overgrowth and removing rubbish. Meanwhile, the man made him a curry. Jalland returned the following week to do his back garden, too. “We were able to sit down and have a chat. I got to know the bloke. Some people are on their own; they need someone to talk to. It’s all part of it.”
When he posted pictures of the garden’s transformation on Facebook, an avalanche hit: “It got 40,000 likes and about 5,000 comments.” He also received 1,000 direct messages asking for help, not generally from garden owners, but from their concerned neighbours, friends and family. “I thought: ‘What the hell have I done?’” Jalland recalls. “People need help. Reading them, the amount that it brought me to tears was unreal.” So he decided to offer one free garden clearance a week. He has been doing closer to three.
For every clearance, just as Jalland suspected, there has been a story of struggle lurking not so deeply in the weeds. It’s rarely laziness or nonchalance. Behind Thursby’s jungle is her father’s ill health, her adult daughter’s ill health and, finally, her own: a stage-four cervical cancer diagnosis in 2024, followed by gruelling treatment. “I’m sick a lot, I’m tired and I stagger,” she says.
A few days before this, Jalland cleared for a “bloke housebound on the sofa”, whose doors were so blocked by overgrowth that they had become a “firetrap”. Brambles reached his bungalow’s gutters. Jalland spent seven hours clearing. Then there was a mum with cancer who wanted a space for her young daughter to play. Often, mental health concerns accompany or supersede physical ailments. “I did a woman the other day and you could see she’s suffering – the anxiety, the stress,” Jalland says.
Next, there was the married couple, one of whom had become her partner’s carer and then broken her wrist. With garden maintenance becoming unmanageable, she became terrified of eviction. “She was in tears about it,” he says. And Jalland? “God, yeah.”
He admits he struggles to prioritise the jobs he takes on; he tends to go by instinct and geography, offering a visit when he is nearby doing paid work. “I can’t decide whether multiple sclerosis is worse than mental health, or mental health worse than being in a wheelchair … I’m going to look at it as the bigger picture. Yes, somebody’s struggling. Someone needs help.”
In Thursby’s garden, he begins to cry again. He is deeply moved by her thanks. She adored her garden after moving here with her daughter in 2008. “I have been feeling very down, I think because of the state of it, but also realising what my limitations are,” she says. “The worse it got, the more I realised I was never physically going to be able to get on top of it.” She worried about what people would say. “Would there be a complaint? I didn’t want anybody to come round.” In the end, a friend messaged Jalland. “I would never have asked,” Thursby says.
Jalland’s understanding stems from his own experience. The father of three worked all his adult life as an engineer, but left his job about a year ago to work for himself. His wife works in care and he knows he may need to get a “proper job” again at some point, to help make ends meet. He has had depression in the past and still takes medication. “I’ve been at the bottom of that barrel looking up quite a few times,” he says. It happened initially after a motorcycle accident when his wife was expecting their first child. They had moved into their first home and his physical injuries, plus the stress of being unable to work or maintain the house, sent him to a dark place.
Then came an offer of assistance. “It was an occupational therapist,” he recalls. “She asked: ‘What could we do to help?’ I said the garden was a mess; they cleared and gravelled it, so it was maintenance-free. I felt on top of the world, a feeling of: thank God that’s done – that’s one thing that won’t play on my mind.
“Me cutting the grass does not fix somebody’s mental health problems,” he continues. “But it can aid in making them feel a little bit better about themselves. It just takes away that little bit of stress.” He knows what a patch of usable garden can give. “I’ve said to people: ‘I’m going to make you a space where you can come out of the house and sit and have a cup of coffee and enjoy the sunshine.’ It’s a safe space, a happy space, a clear space.” He is not a gardener, he admits, but he’s making a difference all the same. “I always say: ‘It’s not perfect, but it’s better.’”
As he launches himself at the final section of Thursby’s garden, Jalland explains that he didn’t know how to cut back overgrowth when he began offering free garden clearances; he says it’s “trial and error”. His main tools are two trimmers (one was donated), a rake, a grass-covered broom and a small mower, about 30 years old, which he calls “the little mower that can”. You quickly see why.
His formula is to use a bladed trimmer to slash the tangles of brambles at their trunk-like bases, then yank the woody knots towards him with a rake, to loosen them. He then daubs at the tangles with his trimmer, like an artist with a brush, watching the fragments of stem slip to the floor before the mower chomps it all to sawdust. “You’ve just got to go at it,” he says.
Along with carrier bags and other assorted rubbish, objects start to reveal themselves as the undergrowth thins. At Thursby’s, there is a suitcase and an old Little Tikes easel. “Oh my God, that was here!” she says. She recalls her daughter using it as a child. “She had chalks, she would scribble all over it – she loved crafts.”
Jalland knows that many people will not be able to maintain his work, but he doesn’t mind. “I’d love them to keep on top of it, but they can’t always. I get that. The way I think about it is: I’ll be doing this all again next year if that’s the case.”
He is trying to gather momentum by posting on social media, hoping he can generate funding. At the time of writing, he has only 140 YouTube subscribers. “The videos are shit,” he says. Meanwhile, he is crowdfunding for new tools, with £695 raised so far.
Even when his paid work picks up, he wants to keep his free garden clearances going on Saturdays. “I think I have found a purpose for my life, in a way,” he says. “There’s a need and I can fill it – and it’s filling big gaps in my heart, isn’t it?” Has he seen a change in his own mood? “I don’t know, because I’m knackered,” he says. “But when I go home and take my boots off, I do feel I have done something good.”
In the UK, the mental health charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14 and MensLine on 1300 789 978
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