Plants love heavy metal

Garden guru Chris Beardshaw is recommending a new technique for bigger blooms - blast your plants with heavy metal by Birmingham rock legends Black Sabbath.

The broadcaster and gardening expert revealed to UK's Radio 4 listeners that a constant diet of Black Sabbath worked wonders on a greenhouse full of plants.

But he told the audience that exposure to Sir Cliff Richard proved a total disaster and killed every plant in a horticultural experiment.

- We set up four glasshouses with different sorts of music in to see what happened to the plants. We had one that was silent - that was a control house - and we had one that was played classical music, we had one that was played Cliff Richard and we had one that was played Black Sabbath. The plants grown with Black Sabbath were the shortest, but they had the best flowers and the best resistance to pest and disease - said Beardshaw.