‘Everyone's a gardener!'

Tayshan Hayden-Smith on how the Grenfell Tower fire inspired him to swap football for horticulture…

- HANNAH DAVIES

YOUR GARDEN MADE PERFECT

FRI / BBC2 / 8PM (NOT NI & WALES) / EP 5 of 6 / LIFESTYLE

Tayshan Hayden-Smith has already made his mark on BBC2’s Your Garden Made Perfect as a low-cost design specialist, helping families on limited budgets create stunning gardens in small spaces.

However, Tayshan’s road to horticulture fame has been an unusual one. He started out as a footballer, but after the devastating Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, he became a ‘guerilla gardener’ in the local community.

Here, Tayshan, 25, tells TV Times about his career switch and how we can all be green-fingered…

You used to be a footballer, so how did you become a gardener?

I’m still football mad! I played semi-professionally for Brentford and I did a stint at Wimbledon and QPR, so if you’d told me five years ago that gardening would be on the agenda, I’d have said, ‘Good one!’