Friday, August 08, 2003

How To Attract Things that Flutter Into Your Garden!


1. Butterflies: Plant a buddleia and allow it to grow rampant in one corner. Very soon you will have a twenty-foot, man-eating triffid with huge purple flowers eating your shed. Buddleias are virulent creatures that put out small pods resembling testicles. Once every spring thousands of fluttering, irritating butterflies burst forth from these crusty polyps and savage the local petunias.
A feral and unkempt buddleia will produce an entire council estate of aggressive red admirals, dole scrounging cabbage whites and loutish blue emperors, all brandishing flick knives and cider bottles and crates of Newcastle Brown.
And the butterflies will attract the neighbour's cat!
Very soon your whole garden will be devastated as the cat thrashes and hurtles its stupid way through your lobelia, your lilies and your Douglas fir with various native British butterflies in its salivating mouth, shredding their delicate wings, snapping their antennae and laying low to your hanging baskets.
2. Birds: The common sparrow is becoming increasingly rare in British gardens nowadays due to the huge amount of decking that Alan Titmarsh uses to cover lazy bastard's lawns. Before you hide your garden with bits of old palette first dig up some worms and place them on a raised platform or garden chair. By morning a flock of innocent sparrows will have taken up squatter's rights behind your dustbin. You'll be amazed at how quickly the neighbour's cat will pounce on the little bastards.
Hours of fun can be obtained trying to prize the cat's jaws apart to release the flapping bird. After a prolonged and violent struggle the sparrow will eventually escape over the wall and into the neighbour's illegal bonfire, the smoke from which has been ruining your washing all afternoon.
Unfortunately, regardless of what David Attenborough might claim to the contrary, sparrows are not intelligent creatures. By the following morning the bird brained little cretin will have returned to your back doorstep, this time minus its head and several tail feathers.