Gardeners support Air Ambulance

Saturday's sunshine brought visitors to Alexander Drive and Collington Lane West.

But it also brought admirers to Penny Lane, where in the past three years Barry and Jean Symes have transformed what had been predominantly lawn into an attractive design featuring an enlarge pond with cascasde, bonsai trees and, in a little dog-leg off the main plot, a productive hidden kitchen garden.

They brought 150 potted plants from their old home to their new.

Visitors also delighted in the novelty Frog Chorus and the Teddy Bears' Picnic.

Pat and Robin Riley started out 10 years ago to turn a "wilderness" into a garden at Glassenbury Drive.

Only the mature apple tree standing centre-stage remains of those times.

Now the glasshouse holds ripening tomatoes, a heather bed prospers and the garage is all-but hidden as pot plant scale its walls.

Mary and David Worlock's Pebsham Lane garden, on the other hand, did not require drastic measures.

David said: "I have re-shaped the borders '“ there was a straight path then."

The scent of honeysuckle filled the air as he explained how good the clematis had been this year.

Asked what she had changed in three and a half years at Chantry Avenue, Jean Kitchen said: "Everything!

"It was a wilderness. There was nothing in it except one viburnum."

Now, between 200 and 300 bags of manure later, dahlias ans nicotiana and penstemon flourish and the bottom of the garden where the bamboo and the raspberries grow is a forest of sunflowers '“ self-sown from last year