| There are occasions when science is extremely useful. It tells us why plants grow towards light, why water moves through soil, why seasons change and why putting a tender plant outside during a February frost generally produces disappointing results. There are also occasions when science can become something of a nuisance, particularly when you have a perfectly good story to tell, and somebody insists on pointing out that it couldn’t possibly happen. So before we begin, I should acknowledge that there are excellent biological reasons why an aphid cannot become the size of a football, a bumblebee cannot grow to the dimensions of a bicycle and a beetle cannot wander through Kent roughly resembling a double-decker bus. I accept all of this completely. For what happened one Tuesday morning, however, science is going to have to wait in the van. The day began normally enough. There had been a little rain overnight, the forecast suggested it would remain reasonably dry, and I was expecting nothing more dramatic than the usual collection of lawns, hedges and borders. John and I had work to get through, the van was loaded, and there was absolutely no indication that the natural world had decided to make itself considerably more noticeable. The first clue came when I walked towards the van and found what appeared to be a green football sitting on the bonnet. My immediate thought was that somebody had left it there. My second was that footballs don’t normally have legs. The third arrived when the football turned slightly towards me, and I realised I was looking at an aphid. There are moments in life for which experience provides no useful guidance. I’ve dealt with aphids for years. I’ve brushed them from stems, washed them away, left them for ladybirds and occasionally squashed them without giving the matter much philosophical consideration. None of that prepares you for an aphid approximately twenty-five centimetres across sitting beside your windscreen. It wasn’t aggressive. If anything, it appeared rather bewildered by the situation itself. I stood looking at it for perhaps thirty seconds before John arrived, looked at the bonnet, looked at me and asked the entirely reasonable question, “What’s that?” I told him it was an aphid. He looked at it again and said, “That’s a big aphid.” There seemed little point arguing. Within ten minutes it became apparent that the aphid wasn’t an isolated incident. The rose beside the house contained another five, each roughly football-sized and clinging to the stems with considerably more confidence than the stems deserved. An ant emerged from beneath the paving, also football-sized, which raised an immediate concern about what might now be living beneath the patio. Then something enormous moved across the sky. For a moment I thought it was a bird, until a bumblebee roughly the size of a bicycle passed over the garden, its wings producing a noise somewhere between a lawnmower and a helicopter, before descending towards a patch of lavender. I’ve always liked bumblebees. They are among those garden visitors whose presence reassures you that something is going right, and watching one work its way methodically through flowers is one of the small pleasures of being outside. Watching one the size of a bicycle approach the same flowers changes the experience considerably. The bee remained perfectly peaceful. The lavender was less fortunate. It landed with tremendous enthusiasm, flattened approximately half the plant and began feeding as though nothing unusual had occurred. Pollination, I thought, was going to be excellent this year. Structural damage might be another matter. By then our phones had started buzzing. News alerts appeared, and social media had abandoned whatever it had been arguing about the previous evening and united around the discovery that every insect in the country had become enormous. Nobody knew why. The smallest species seemed to be roughly football-sized; medium insects had reached something approaching bicycle size; larger ones were comparable to cars; and the biggest insects had become, according to one increasingly breathless television reporter, approximately the dimensions of a London bus. Scientists were being interviewed from studios and explaining that this was biologically impossible. At the same time, behind one of them, something resembling a dragonfly flew past the window, which would have required its own parking space. John and I considered the situation. We had six gardens to do, and there is something about working in gardening that makes cancelling an entire day feel surprisingly difficult, even when the country’s insect population has increased in mass by several million per cent. The first client was expecting us, the lawn needed cutting and there were hedges to attend to. The aphid on the van showed no inclination to move, so we encouraged it gently with a broom. This proved surprisingly effective until it rolled off the bonnet and landed beside the driver’s door. Eventually, it wandered into the border, apparently unharmed, and we set off. Traffic was unusually light, although I imagine most sensible people had stayed at home. Our first garden initially looked reasonably normal, provided you ignored the bicycle-sized ladybird sitting on the lawn. Ladybirds are beneficial insects, something gardeners are constantly encouraged to remember, and under ordinary circumstances I’d have been delighted to see it. At bicycle size, however, the definition of beneficial required some adjustment. It had apparently been feeding on the enormous aphids on a nearby rose and was doing an excellent job, though every time it moved, it crushed several square feet of lawn. I decided that pest control was working and left it alone. The client appeared at the back door and asked whether we were still doing the hedge. I looked at the ladybird, looked at the hedge and told her that we were. There are traditions to maintain. For the first hour things went remarkably well. The insects weren’t attacking anybody; they were carrying on with their normal lives at deeply inconvenient dimensions. Ants crossed the patio carrying pieces of material that would ordinarily have required two people and a wheelbarrow. A football-sized fly landed on the fence and spent several minutes cleaning its front legs, an activity considerably less charming when you can see exactly what it’s doing from thirty feet away. Somewhere beyond the houses came the unmistakable deep vibration of another giant bee. Then we reached the hedge, and anyone who cuts hedges professionally develops a certain respect for wasps. Finding a wasp nest with a hedge cutter is one of those experiences you generally prefer to have only once. You learn to watch for activity, recognise the warning signs and retreat when necessary. That morning, however, there was no need to look for subtle signs. A wasp roughly the size of a bicycle emerged from the hedge and hovered in front of us. John switched off his hedge cutter, and I switched off mine. We stood looking at the wasp while the wasp appeared to consider us. Gardening teaches you when to persevere and when to accept that nature has won, and this was very clearly the latter. I suggested we’d come back to that particular section. By late morning, Britain had effectively stopped. Roads were being closed wherever larger insects landed. Schools had kept children indoors, although this seemed optimistic considering that some of the insects were now considerably larger than classrooms. Airports suspended flights after several pilots reported that the objects appearing on radar weren’t aircraft. The government issued advice recommending that people remain calm, stay indoors where possible, and avoid approaching unusually large insects, which was excellent advice. However, the phrase “unusually large” seemed somewhat unnecessary by then. Butterflies were causing surprisingly serious problems because nobody expects trouble from a butterfly, which perhaps explains why we were completely unprepared for them. A car-sized cabbage white landed in a vegetable plot and flattened most of the brassicas before it had even begun considering where to lay its eggs. At the same time, a peacock butterfly crossed the road in front of us with wings broad enough to briefly block the view through the windscreen. It was astonishingly beautiful. It was also one of the few occasions in my life when I’ve braked sharply to avoid colliding with a butterfly. Lunch was eaten inside the van with the windows firmly closed, a precaution that proved sensible when a fly the size of a football landed on the passenger window and stared at John through the glass. Neither of us had ever appreciated quite how complicated a fly’s face was, and some things in nature benefit enormously from being small. Ants were beginning to create problems too. Normally an ant carrying something many times its own weight is an impressive demonstration of natural engineering, but when the ant itself is football-sized the calculations become rather different. Across Kent, bins were moving. Garden furniture disappeared. One news report showed a group of ants carrying a child’s paddling pool across a playing field while a police officer watched helplessly from behind his car. Another had apparently taken a garden gnome. Nobody knew where. Then we encountered the beetle, and even after everything we’d seen that day, this was different. It wasn’t large in the way the butterflies were large; this was bus-large. Traffic had stopped approaching a roundabout outside town, and cars were turning around and coming back towards us. A police officer was directing vehicles away while another stood beside a barrier speaking urgently into a radio. Beyond them, occupying most of the roundabout, sat an enormous beetle. Its shell reflected the afternoon sun, its legs rested across two lanes, and its head was approximately where the road sign had been. It wasn’t rampaging through the town or attacking anyone. It was simply sitting there, apparently enjoying the warmth, while the police tried to establish what exactly one did about a beetle occupying a roundabout. Somebody from the council had arrived with a clipboard, which I found strangely reassuring. Whatever happened to civilisation, there would apparently still be somebody from the council standing behind a barrier holding paperwork. We turned around, and by four o’clock we’d abandoned any serious hope of completing the day’s round. A car-sized dragonfly had taken possession of a pond at one client’s garden and, while dragonflies are magnificent predators of other insects, there are limits to how closely you need to observe them doing it. Another garden contained several bicycle-sized bees and something beneath the shed that neither John nor I particularly wanted identified. We informed the client that we’d return another day. She asked whether Thursday would be possible and, after a moment’s consideration, whether we could still do the lawn when we came. I said we probably could, assuming the insects were smaller by then. She accepted this as though it were now a perfectly normal condition of gardening. The strange thing was that, for all the chaos, the insects themselves hadn’t really changed. That became increasingly obvious as the day went on. They weren’t angry, they hadn’t become intelligent, and they weren’t coordinating an uprising against humanity. The aphids wanted plants. The bees wanted flowers. The ladybirds wanted aphids. Ants continued moving things around for reasons known only to ants. Butterflies drifted between flowers, flies remained irritating, and wasps continued possessing that particular confidence that suggests they have never once questioned their place in the world. Only their size had changed, which was more than enough. At about six o’clock, something else happened. The bumblebee outside our house seemed smaller. At first I assumed I’d become accustomed to seeing enormous insects, which was a worrying thought in itself, but over the next few minutes the change became unmistakable. The bicycle-sized bee shrank until it was perhaps the size of a football, then an orange and finally something resembling an actual bumblebee. Across the garden the aphids were shrinking too. Television coverage became increasingly excited as the bus-sized beetle on the roundabout reduced to car size, then bicycle size, then football size before eventually becoming a beetle again. Butterflies descended gently through the various categories of British transport until they could once more land on flowers without causing structural damage. At the same time, ants abandoned whatever enormous objects they’d been carrying and disappeared back beneath the paving. By sunset it was over. Nobody knew why it had happened, nor why it had stopped. The scientists who had spent the morning explaining that it couldn’t happen spent the evening explaining that it couldn’t have happened, despite several million people having spent the day watching it happen. Britain was left with damaged greenhouses, flattened borders, abandoned cars, displaced garden furniture and an insurance industry facing claims that no policy document had thought to exclude. Somewhere in Kent, presumably, there was also a garden gnome whose whereabouts remained unknown. The following morning I went outside shortly before work. The van still had a slight dent where the aphid had been sitting, and the lavender looked as though somebody had dropped a bicycle on it, but otherwise everything was normal. A bee moved quietly among the flowers, and a butterfly crossed the garden, briefly blocking the sun. On the rose beside the house, almost exactly where the whole ridiculous business had started, sat an aphid: tiny, green and precisely the size an aphid had every right to be. I looked at it for a moment while it continued feeding. Normally I might have brushed it away, but after everything we’d been through together, that somehow seemed petty, so I left it alone. A little later, John arrived. We loaded the van and went back to finish the hedge. |
| About our writing & imagery Most articles reflect our real gardening experience and reflection. Some use AI in drafting or research, but never for voice or authority. Featured images may show our photos, original AI-generated visuals, or, where stated, images credited to others. All content is shaped and edited by Earthly Comforts, expressing our own views. |
A Gardener's Curiosity 
Is this true or science fiction?
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