Remember to treat bumblebees nicely — they never forget a face!
Without ladybirds, we’d be neck- deep in greenfly. the aphids that feed on garden roses can clone themselves so quickly that one tiny pest could multiply into swarms, numbering not millions but hundreds of billions, in a single summer.
Luckily, their spotted predators gobble them up in fistfuls. Greenfly are very moreish, if you’re a ladybird.
information of this ‘did- youknow?’ variety abounds in Plant Odysseys (BBC2), a voyage around the garden in search of the most improbable and entertaining stories. Presenter Carol Klein is such an enthusiast that she was constantly digging up facts never heard on tV before.
Every programme about bees tells us they can see in the ultraviolet light spectrum, for instance — but as she explained the markings on iris petals that are invisible to our eyes, Carol casually chucked in the notion that bees can recognise and remember individual human faces.
imagine that: the honeybee apparently intent on droning from flower to flower may actually be watching you from one corner of its antennae, memorising your features. Perhaps that’s why beekeepers wear veils, as a disguise.
Among dozens of other things that were new to me was the ancient Greek custom of planting irises on women’s graves. the flowers helped the dead find their way to paradise and it’s a custom that still persists in corners of turkey.
in Florence, farmers have grown irises for hundreds of years, not for their gorgeous blooms — ‘reminiscent of a feather boa,’ said Carol — but for their roots.
trimmed and dried for five years, the tubers can be ground to a fine powder that smells of . . . violets, oddly enough. it’s popular for flavouring gin and potpourri. Who could have guessed that, before Carol told us?
this is when an evening in front of the telly feels like time spent in enjoyable self-improvement, as educative as reading a book. there was no padding in the show: the series’ only real fault is that these half-hour episodes could easily stretch to an hour and never be dull.
Even if you’re not really interested in gardens, it’s worth tuning in for Carol’s narration, with her rich delight in words and an earthy Lancashire accent. As she described the iris, ‘ostentatiously ornate and deliciously seductive’, it was like listening to Dame Judi Dench doing a cameo on Coronation Street.
Liverpudlian comedian Johnny Vegas had his own way with words in the voiceover for Travel Guides (itV). he renamed Dubai, the Arabian Gulf ’s luxury resort, ‘Dooo-bye’.
What last week’s jaunt to thailand with this cast hadn’t made clear was that the same families will be our guides throughout the series. the heart sank as the same faces popped up — the gay hairdressers, the wannabe WAGS from Birmingham, the couple with the moaning kids.
it was a familiar sensation, like running into those same ghastly people you met on the Costa del Sol last year, and enough to make you want to turn round and catch the next plane home.
the show treated Dubai like a standard package holi day destination. Despite the fact the united Arab Emirates is a teetotal Muslim country, everyone was sloshing back the booze and lounging beside the pool. it seems perverse to slog all the way to an islamic nation i n the Persian Gulf to do this, when it’s so much easier and nearer to fly to tenerife.
Not to mention cheaper — two vodkas and a Coke from a Dubai minibar will set you back forty quid. the middle- class family from Dorset, the Boyles, the ones who were banging on about how they detested materialism, ran up a room service bill of nearly £1,500 in a week.
But the scene that would really put anyone off was the camel safari, followed by a night in a Bedouin tent.
After a day on hump-back, the holidaymakers tucked into a bowl of camel stew. that’s like going pony-trekking, and dining on horsemeat. Just horrible.