My story is a serendipitous one, how one thing leads to another. I'm going back about 20 years. I used to have clarinet lessons and my teacher left and went to another part of the country. And she came back to visit. And we arranged to meet in Crossgates for lunch. And she was late, very late, as we're thinking of leaving. When she arrived, she apologised profusely, but she said, I'm so excited, because I've just been to see some friends in a village not far from here and they have started an In Bloom group. And you can't, you can't believe what they've done.

She told me who her friend was. I let it settle for a few days and then I contacted this person, who in turn put me in touch with a man called John Tinker, who lived in this village and he put me in touch with someone who worked in Leeds City Council parks department and he gave me lots of leads about how to get my own In Bloom group going.

At the time, I was on the parish council. The parish council wasn't really doing very much, because it was in its early days, and it was feeling its way. I contacted a couple of people on the parish council, useful people to get something going and that's exactly what happened. We started our own In Bloom group in Shadwell. And it was very slow going to start with but we did get money from the parish council. So money wasn't a major issue, but getting people to participate was a major issue. To cut a very long story short, the three of us kept going for about five or six years. But the group gradually grew.

Every Tuesday since then a group of people, it's now up to about 20 people a week are involved. We celebrated the 20th anniversary about a month ago and there were 70 people at the dinner.