A team of offenders are feeling blooming marvellous after taking on Britain's top gardeners and winning a prize at a prestigious flower show. The team from North Wales were the first ever offenders allowed to compete at the Royal Horticultural Society's Tatton Flower Show near Knutsford.
Remarkably, despite having no real gardening experience, their entry in the National Flower Bed Competition won a bronze medal - beating the likes of Manchester City Council and even a horticultural college. They entered the competition as the result of a growing partnership between the North Wales Probation Area and Conwy County Borough Council.
As a way of paying back their debt to society, the offenders were ordered by the courts to do unpaid work that is beneficial to the community. In Conwy, they have been helping do manual work in local parks and at the authority’s Tanllan Nurseries, in Llanelian – and that’s where the idea first germinated.
The council has an impressive track record at Tatton. And this year the authority's own entry won a gold medal and the Best in Show Award.
While the council’s effort featured a floral butterfly, the probation entry depicted a brick wall covered in graffiti – made out of 7,000 summer bedding plants. Masterminding both entries has been Peter Barton-Price, the council’s Assistant Manager for Parks and Green Spaces.
He said: “Getting a bronze award from the RHS is an amazing achievement. They came down here with no horticultural experience as such and they have put in a huge amount of effort. The National Flowerbed Competition is a huge event and what they have done is monumental. We see the partnership with the Probation Service as a great opportunity to look at some of the tasks we were unable to look at due to manpower and also to give an opportunity to people on probation. The National Flowerbed competition at TattonPark is probably the second biggest competition held by the Royal Horticultural Society and the other one is at Chelsea Flower Show. So, it doesn’t get much bigger than this. This is one of the pinnacles of the horticultural calendar – this is a big deal for us. We’ve had to teach the offenders team how to plant quickly, effectively and extremely efficiently.
“We only had three days and had to be finished by Monday night regardless of sleep or fatigue because the judging started at 10am on Tuesday and the show opened on Wednesday. I had never done two flower beds at the same time. We cut it to the wire last year so this year has been a massive challenge. Within each of these flowerbeds there is a minimum of 3,500 summer bedding plants.”
Community Service Supervisor Bryan Dunt was thrilled about the prospect of being at Tatton with his team – and is even more delighted with the result.
He said: “I can't put into words how wonderful a feeling it is. It's absolutely unbelievable - we have beaten the likes of Manchester and Carlisle city councils not to mention a horticultural college. No Probation Service had ever shown at the Tatton Show before and there’s never been a partnership arrangement with a council allowed to take part so to come away with a bronze medal is absolutely brilliant. The design was based on an anti-graffiti message – a brick wall with graffiti on it but made out of summer bedding plants. It’s been very intense but it was an ideal opportunity for the Probation Service to prove what we can do. This is a big feather in our cap. The head judge told me that we had been brave to pick graffiti as a theme because it's a blight on society but usually nobody wants to talk about it. He said he was very impressed with what we had done.I have really got the bug now and we will definitely be coming back to compete next year”.
Bryan paid tribute to the efforts of his hard working two man team, Dave Turner and Paul Marshall. Officially both men have completed the hours they were ordered to do by local magistrates and carried on voluntarily so they could compete at Tatton.
Dave 19 from Colwyn Bay said: "I started doing this when I was doing Community Service and when I finished Bryan asked me to carry on. I'm really glad that I did because it's been a great experience. I didn't expect to win anything to begin with but when we had finished it all it looked pretty good so I thought we were in with a chance to win something. I'm really pleased that we won a bronze medal, ecstatic."
North Wales Probation Service Chief Officer Carol Moore said: “We’ve been very grateful to Conwy for providing this opportunity and it just shows what can be achieved by agencies working together.”
