On a quiet street in Sydney’s Glebe, Nathan Stafford is standing halfway up a ladder balancing his child’s old shoe, with his phone wedged inside, on the ladder’s top rung. He’s trying to angle his phone to get a good shot of the yard of a public housing unit below. The weeds have run wild and the grass is threatening to reclaim the concrete footpath snaking through.
Moments ago the shoe and the phone were atop a yellow bin he’d dragged to the front door of the home to film the resident, Jo Lee, as she answers his loud knock. She’d asked him to come help.
“I got a message you need a little hand with your lawn,” Stafford says blithely to Lee. “What would you say if I knocked this over for you for free?”
“Absolutely,” she responds.
It’s a typically barebones filming operation for a gardener who has curiously amassed a huge international following and, a few weeks ago, scored a meeting with the New South Wales housing minister to discuss the state of social housing.
Stafford, in his videos and in person, is shaped in the mould of a knockabout Aussie bloke; he’s self-deprecating, no-fuss and jovial. He tells his millions of followers: “I’m just a lawnmower man, I’m no one special.”
So who is this humble lawnmower man, and why has he come to be of such influence?
About eight years ago Stafford, who lives in Ryde and has three children, started filming videos of himself gardening while doing paid jobs. At first they only got a couple of clicks but, after four years of regularly posting himself artfully trimming a perfect edge along a lawn or taming gardens for free, his videos started to hit the tens of thousands, then millions of views. Now, he has upwards of 2 million followers on TikTok, 1.7 million on Facebook, and 1.6 million on Instagram.
The 44-year-old’s videos, some of which have been watched as many as 125m times, can be oddly beautiful and satisfying in their simplicity. There are the quasi-sensory snippets of him scraping up tufts of grass from pavements. Time-lapses of him tidying up overgrown messes. Nature returned to human-made order.
“I think there’s something in our brains that just likes to see a mess cleaned up,” Stafford says.
His videos cross over two of some of the most popular genres of social media content: tidying videos and ASMR videos. But a core part of his brand are philanthropic acts for “legends” who are “doing it tough”. Mainly taming unruly gardens for those who are unable to manage their gardens themselves, nor pay for someone else to do it for them.
Such is the case of Lee in Glebe. Her son has chronic fatigue syndrome and she has a shoulder injury. She has been trying to get the housing department to send someone to help with her garden, to no avail.
“It’s very hard to find help these days,” Lee tells Guardian Australia. “I’m so grateful for Nathan.”
Stafford later films himself giving her money, saying it could go towards paying someone to clean up her lawn next time or for food, “or whatever you’ve got to do”.
Videos like these sit within another social media phenomenon of content creators undertaking acts of philanthropy for an audience. Some of these videos have been criticised as fodder for clicks and followers – a monetisation of kindness.
Stafford says neither making money nor collecting more followers is his motivation. “I just want to give back,” he says.
“I’ve always done jobs for discounts and free for the seniors,” he says. Unpaid work pre-dated his social media fame and his ASMR videos had amassed him more than a million followers before he thought about filming his free jobs. As his followers increased, he noticed a trend in the US where garden content creators would randomly knock on people’s doors and ask if they could clean up their gardens for free. He began to do the same, driving around Sydney, searching for overgrown yards.
Sometimes the videos can feel uncomfortable. When he knocks on the door, the person answering sometimes seems confused as to why this upbeat man is at their home, recording them, while he asks them if he can clean their garden for free “and when I finish all you got to do is come out and tell me what you think”. Many are vulnerable, some live in public housing.
He says about 95% of people say yes and are thrilled by the result. He posts a video for about half the free jobs he does; either due to the recipient requesting him not to or him deciding it wouldn’t be appropriate. Lee doesn’t mind Stafford filming her, she says, because it helps him help others.
“I try to make it as positive as possible,” he says. “Sometimes there can be can be some shame about [having an overgrown garden] but I don’t want to be what this is.”
Stafford now splits his time between paid jobs and free services – the money he gets from his social media content, and a gardening tools brand that sponsors him, now covers his expenses to do the free jobs.
In a video from last year he cleans a house up that has no running water and is soon to be demolished. The resident, who is squatting, tells Stafford he can’t access homelessness services because of his dog.
In a voiceover on top of footage of himself dislodging weeds, Stafford acknowledges the futility of tidying up a house due for demolition.
He also reveals that he has experienced homelessness in his youth. “I know what it’s like … Hopefully [the man squatting] walks away and thinks people care.”
He tells Guardian Australia: “I’ve come from the other side of the fence, so I know what this is all about. I relate to these people, and I know that they’re struggling.”
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Stafford believes his audience finds comfort in seeing a problem, and something being done about it, soundtracked by the buzz of a lawnmower. But he has started to piece together for both his viewers and himself, video by video, a bigger picture. A picture about the state of public housing, and how we support those who rely upon it. He says his audience is starting to ask: “What is the government doing about this?”
He rarely says anything about his free gardening recipients beyond the fact they’re “doing it tough”. They have other stories – about their personal lives and their efforts to get other maintenance work done – that he doesn’t put on camera, he says, and they leave him sleepless at night.
In a video at the start of April, veering from his usual garden clean-up, he cleans a man’s home in a public housing estate littered with mess and bottles. In commentary overlaid on to footage of him sweeping up piles of rubbish from the person’s lounge room, he calls out to the NSW housing minister, Rose Jackson, for a meeting. The video reached the minister and she agreed to meet him. Stafford plans to take her for a walk around the homes of people he has helped at the end of May.
Announcing the meeting to his followers, he thanks them for giving him his platform for good.
“This is only because of you legends,” he says.
At the end of his job at Lee’s house in Glebe, with the grass freshly cut, and the path visible again, he looks up at the phone propped in the shoe in the ladder. Then he gives his viewers a big thumbs up.
