‘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 ...

By Emily Retter