BB

No not Big Brother - Butterflies and Bees! That's what it said on the packet anyway. I've got a bed outside my house which used to be filled with old, nasty conifers and I dug them out and burnt them at the end of last year. Since then it lay fallow, but I had a plan. I was a little bit busy during the months of April and May, but towards the beginning of June, I finally managed to sow my butterfly and bee experiment.

It seemed to be a big let down.

Nothing happened for ages - although that may have been because the weather was so dry. I thought I'd left it too late to sow. I thought it was going to look terrible, but I persevered and I watered it lovingly with a watering can, and chased away my cats, who discovered there was a lot of fun to be had rolling around in a dust bath.

But then - to my surprise - almost it seemed overnight - there was an array of flowers!



It just got better and better - more flowers appeared, and in the middle, like a great big surprised exclamation mark was a huge sunflower, which I'm sure wasn't in the packet. And all day long it's busy with the hum of bees and the movement of butterflies. It really does what it said on the tin!





And then one morning recently, I was upstairs and I saw a couple walking along the road. And they STOPPED OUTSIDE MY HOUSE! They stood admiring my flowers! It was brillant! I could hear them saying "oh isn't that lovely!". Then a couple of days later as I was getting out of my car my next door neighbour was there, and he told me that he liked to just stand and look at the flowers first thing in the morning (bit weird, but hey, I'm not complaining). And he said that my flower bed was the talk of the street. Well, I have to say I felt a bit chuffed. I probably can't tell you what half the flowers are - and at the end of the day it was just an experiment, but I think it looks just lovely, and it's obviously brought some pleasure to other people to. And that's what it's all about.