CALLING ALL you green-fingered gardeners. Today we launch our Garden of the Year competition and with it the search for the best gardeners in the area.
Here is your chance to share your gardening skills with others and to collect a barrow-load of prizes.
This year’s outright winner will receive a £500 Examiner reader travel voucher which we will provide for you to whisk yourself and a guest off for a well-deserved break.
And when our winner gets home, they’ll still be able to enjoy the sight of the cut-glass Examiner Trophy, which will grace the mantelpiece of our Garden Of The Year winner for a year.
Competition sponsors Armitage’s Garden Centres continue to support us, offering vouchers worth £100 for the winner of each of our three categories to spend at its centres.
Second prize winners will collect £75 and third-placed gardeners win £50.
Waterstone’s, our other long-term Garden of the Year sponsors, have come up with a super gardening book, The Faber Book of Gardens edited by Philip Robinson. It’s worth £12.99 and each of our nine winners will get one.
Bubbly Liz Philpot won the title last year with a stunning garden backing on to open land high above Meltham.
Her garden certainly had the wow factor, thrilling the judges with its exuberance and colour.
Liz has a garden packed with plants, plants and more plants. She learned her gardening skills as a child working alongside her grandfather and then her dad and has developed a hugely creative style of her own.
Her terrific garden was one of many gems discovered in a search which took judges across the district, finding tiny terraced gardens and one or two patches which were definitely on the grand scale.
All proved one thing: that Huddersfield is packed with gardening talent. As for Liz, she was delighted to have won the competition at only her second attempt. “I’m thrilled. I can’t quite believe it,” she commented at the time.
So what are you waiting for? Fill in the form, send us a few pictures of your garden looking its best – and fingers crossed. You could be featuring in our Garden of the Year winners’ list this summer.
Fill in the coupon which appears on this page (or which our gardening writer Graham Porter will be including on his Saturday gardening page in the Examiner) and send it to: Garden Of The Year Competition, Features Department, Huddersfield Daily Examiner, Queen Street South, Huddersfield HD1 3DU. You can drop your entry in to our office at Queen Street South. Entries will close on June 26 and judges aim to be out and about during the week beginning July 13.
