JANE Errington’s trip to Whitecliff Park started innocently enough. She, her partner Mark Marengo and their three girls decided to spend a few hours in the Sunday sunshine.

But this excursion ended up creating a global news story, with radio and TV debates and pages of press and public comment provoked after a member of a local councillor’s family claimed to have spotted the girls picking daffodils and called the police, who issued a warning.

According to Jane: “The girls had just been picking flowers in the sunshine and were left crying their eyes out.

“They say they don’t want to go back to the park now because they are scared of the police.”

She contacted the Daily Echo. She said. “It seems stupid for the police to be called to deal with this – surely taxpayers’ money can be better spent than watching some girls picking flowers.”

Soon, it was national news. The story appeared on Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show, on Channel 5’s Matthew Wright show, and was covered extensively in the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express and on BBC South and Meridian.

Even heavyweight political magazine The Spectator got in on the act. And it didn’t even stop there, with the story spilling over national borders to appear on news websites in India, Thailand and Africa.

Even America’s top business read, Forbes magazine, carried the news on its website, as did the Maine Lawyer.

Can all these people really have been that interested in what the Telegraph dubbed the Case of the Dorset Daffodils? Especially when a tsunami, with all the attendant destruction and horror, had just swept Japan?

Jane has been “amazed” at the reaction.

“I’m probably more flabbergasted at the attention than anything else,” she says. “It’s been such a topical thing and caused such a reaction, which you just wouldn’t imagine would be of national interest especially with other things going on round the world. You do question people’s perspective.”

Like many who have found themselves in the spotlight, Jane has been called by a gaggle of news organisations and TV shows. So will she be appearing on Lorraine Kelly’s sofa or on Daybreak anytime soon?

She laughs, admitting there had been “a few calls”, including one from the Jeremy Vine show – the family declined the offer to appear on it because there were children involved.

She also won’t be hiring Max Clifford to represent her, and she cheerfully admits to not having read any of the news forums that have discussed the story – possibly wisely, as some extreme comments have been made.

One of these, which appeared on the Telegraph’s site said she and her partner were: “Probably the same type of parents who allow their youngsters to run riot in a restaurant, put sticky fingers where they shouldn’t, throw litter on the pavement and damage taps in public loos.”

“I’ve steered clear of these sites entirely,” she adds.

She is adamant no one spoke to her before the police arrived and denies vehemently the claim that her girls had allegedly picked “70 or 80” blooms.

“It would take two little girls a very long time to pick those, so there was not that amount,” she said yesterday.

And so, at the end of what has probably been the strangest week of her life, what is the family intending to do this weekend – another walk in the park?

“Well, we may go,” she says. “We feel it’s important to show the girls they shouldn’t be afraid to go to the park, it’s their park as much as everyone else’s.”

But, she adds: “We ‘ll be steering clear of the daffodils.”