SHE’S a gardening dynamo, a one-woman wonder who has turned a street in Paddock into a flower-packed delight.

Diane Gibson’s traffic-stopping displays of colour start on her doorstep, run up and down the terraced frontages in her street and have spread to houses across the road.

Over the years Diane has got the neighbours buzzing with boxes, baskets and containers of every kind sprouting hundreds of summer blooms. Giant tea cups, Wellington boots, nothing escapes the eagle-eyed Diane when it comes to finding homes for plants.

Even the green waste bins have been given a make-over with huge flower posters adding to the colour-coded back gardens.

Between working part-time in Paddock post office and looking after her own family and her mum, Diane packs her garden with flower – and now vegetable – power in a way which seems to have blossomed throughout her community.

“The window cleaner showed me how to do cuttings,” she said. “He came down off his ladder and did the first few geranium cuttings to start me off,” she said. “It’s fabulous.”

A word from garden judge Graham Porter on a previous visit has given Diane the bug to grow more vegetables.

“It’s been brilliant,” she said. We aim to have veg on our plates for our Christmas dinner that we have grown ourselves.

“This year we’ve grown strawberries, lettuces, cucumbers, potatoes, Brussel sprouts, beetroot, spring onions and radishes. I don’t actually like radishes but I wanted to try and grow them, so I just give them to neighbours.

“We’ve been seeing who could grow the biggest new potatoes and I just love them straight from the garden. They taste so much better.”

“All the neighbours join in and we work together. If people don’t have time to grow things themselves, we bring the plants on and just supply a job lot to do a container with.

“It’s great. It really brings people together. You should have seen the greenhouse we made from anything we could lay our hands on. I got a parcel packed with bubble wrap and thought that would do.

“We even had a bit of a party in it when the weather was bad. Now we’ve got a new neighbour and we are hoping to get her to join in.

“The street looks great. I spend winter planning and can’t wait to get growing.”