Today is the start of the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show in London. This year, the department store Harrods has sponsored a quirky garden which celebrates eccentric British humour, paying homage to the illustrator W. Heath Robinson –  who is a must for anyone involved in patents. 🙂

Heath Robinson even spawned an eponymous adjective – the Oxford Dictionaries define the word as “ingeniously or ridiculously over-complicated in design or construction: ‘a vast Heath Robinson mechanism'”.

To find out more about the garden, see here.

And if you enjoy his extraordinary contraptions, the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford are republishing Heath Robinson’s How to Make a Garden Grow, which will be available in October 2016.

To whet your appetite: “It features many typically elaborate contraptions such as the Combined Telescopic Spaderake for digging and raking at the same time, the Inebriate Roller for making wobbly garden paths and the Osoeezi Slugsticker. While some are patently ridiculous – a lawn is de-thistled and resown with the help of a barrel of grass seed strapped onto a small donkey…”. To order see the Bodleian website here.