The Future is here -18 July 2009

Just north of London can be found the recently opened Future Gardens, the first phase of the ambitious Butterfly World Project.

Opened just 6 weeks ago the gardens were a riot of colour with wildflowers in profusion along the driveway and beside the Meadow Trail.

There is a series of 12 Designer Gardens where the designers have been given free reign to unleash their creativity; most are fantastic, some are 'odd' and three are simply boring. There is a fantasy area where the flower pots, garden fork and so on are hugely oversize; the Through the Flower Pot Garden is designed to show a garden through the eyes of an insect.

However, if you want to see everyone smiling then visit the Theatre of Insects Garden. All manner of unlikely objects have been built into the walls of this stunning area to create nooks and crannies for insects to inhabit.

Obviously, there has to butterflies and until the tropical biome, the largest butterfly display of its kind in the world, is built there is a small walk-through tropical butterfly house where the glories of various species can be admired up close.

Next door is the Royal National Rose Society garden, which unsurprisingly has a huge variety of roses. The open season for this garden is from June to September but in mid-July the roses were already well past their best.