From the Archive:
BBC’s hit show Top Gear had The Stig, now the RHS Show Cardiff is claiming its own version with The Sting, a famous bee-friendly national celebrity whose identity will be revealed at the RHS show on the weekend of April 8th.
The Sting is the invention of media gardener Lynne Allbutt, who appears at the show as a Barefoot Beekeeper in an Inspirational Garden to encourage visitors to make their gardens more attractive to Bees.
Lynne has persuaded a good friend of hers, who is dominating the news at the moment, to dress as a Barefoot Beekeeper, and ‘The Sting’ bears a striking resemblance to the famous stunt driver of Top Gear fame.
Lynne said: “We’re inviting visitors to the show to guess who The Sting really is, with correct answers going into a draw to win a prize connected to the artist in the costume. It’s a bit of fun but it will hopefully get people buzzing, and on Sunday we’ll reveal the true identity of the artist.”
The Cardiff show in the parklands of Cardiff Castle is the first outdoor show of the Royal Horticultural Society season, inspiring gardeners to get out there and busy this spring.
Lynne is a regular contributor to TV and a gardening columnist, and her display features plants such as sedums, lavender and heather that encourage biodiversity and create ideal habitats for bees, whose numbers have been dwindling in recent years.
She is doing a barefoot 10k run in London this autumn and is spending as much time as possible barefoot to prepare her feet for the run. Lynne said, ‘It’s not getting a lot easier though it is feeling more ‘normal’ to be unshodden most of the time. I still wear my steel toecapped boots in work – to go barefoot you’ve got to be hardy but to be building dry stone walls and landscaping barefoot would be fool-hardy!”
Lynne will spend the three Show days barefoot and adds, “Come and say Hello, I’ll be the one barefoot in a beekeepers suit – there shouldn’t be too many of those!”
Leave a Reply