The Parish of St Helier has apologised for throwing away several colourful hand-made fabric and paper flowers found across town this morning.

Members of learning disability charity Jersey Mencap went out in the early hours, putting the beautiful blooms on benches, fences, doorways and lamp-posts all over town.

However, many of the kind-hearted messages were binned by street cleaners.

“They (Mencap) did have a plan to leave them out for a couple of days and then remove them on Wednesday, so people would have an opportunity to see them.

“Unfortunately Mencap didn’t let us know and part of the street-cleaning job is to clear up bits and pieces attached to lampposts and benches so cleaners did their job this morning.

“We have apologised to them and said if we knew, we wouldn’t remove them and we will work with them again in the future if they do something along similar lines.” -Debra d’Orleans, POSH

A bunch was posted through the letterbox of the Channel 103 studios earlier, with a note saying they’re ‘to give a little cheer, on another most miserable day of this year’.

 Mencap have now tweeted to defend the street cleaner’s actions.

@JerseyMencap were delighted to be invited by two, local, professional artists to put smiles on faces with our flower campaign this morning. Wonderful feedback and great fun - if a few got moved in error, no hard feelings at all. pic.twitter.com/sd71K3DLcE

— Jersey Mencap (@JerseyMencap) January 22, 2018