Simon's blue period - The Whole Nine Yards (Tyne Tees)

SMALL can be beautiful is the message that garden expert Simon Cross is sending out with this regional series.

Not for him the massive gardens transformed by the likes of Diarmuid Gavin or Alan Titchmarsh in their BBC programmes. His patch is a much more modest scale - the backyards of the North-East. "I'm not looking for gardens with vast rolling acres," he explains.

He heads for the small, difficult areas outside people's back doors which are quite often, literally, a waste of space. This week, he turned a backyard in Sunderland into what he called The Mexican Yard, although why he'd chosen that particular theme was unclear. The connection between Sunderland and Mexico remains something of a mystery.

Unlike Diarmuid and Alan, he doesn't have an army of helpers to do the work for him. Homeowners, their children and anyone foolish enough to pass by the property are recruited to do the work as Cross employs a budget of between £1,000 and £1,500 - "the sort of money you'd spend on a bigger room in your house"- to create a beautiful backyard.

Most of that cash must have gone on blue paint. Even before work began, someone had an accident with a tin of stuff, spilling it over materials being stored for the transformation. Then Claire, whose home this was, discovered she had acquired two blue children. Cross had set them to work painting a trellis, although they succeeded mostly in painting themselves.

He created different levels of paving as well as sploshing brightly-coloured paint on everything he came across - walls, fences, children. Thank goodness no family pet crossed his path.

Claire didn't seem to mind, declaring, "Wonderful. Better than I could have imagined". Whether she was referring to the garden or her newly-painted children wasn't clear.