Mayor awards prizes to Royston’s first front garden competition winners

Mayor Vera Swallow awarded second prize to Lesley Hutchins pictured with her husband. (Image: Archant)

Prizes have been awarded to winners and runners up of a Royston gardening competition by the town mayor this week.

Naturally Royston launched a new front garden competition earlier this year in which members of the small team walked around as much of the town as they could, scouting for worthy gardens to nominate for the first year of the competition.

Judging took place last month and prizes were presented by town mayor Vera Swallow on Monday.

The judges – Councillor Swallow, fellow town councillor Marguerite Phillips and gardener Rob Irons – had considered the merits of each garden for floral effect, fragrance, attraction to bees and other insects, visible interest and containers in smaller gardens.

Wendy Ball was presented with third prize from mayor Vera Swallow. (Image: Archant)

The first prize of £100 was awarded to Derek Bunting, whose beautiful garden got a wow from the judges and scored highly in all the criteria.

A town council spokeswoman said: “Mr Bunting’s natural garden has been painstakingly created over the years. It is a haven for wildlife and has a good variety of plants and flowers with different areas to explore and discover.”

Second prize and £50 was awarded to Lesley Hutchins after she and her husband have created a garden which was commended for “good use of a small space and that has been well thought out, with colourful, inspirational and easily maintained containers. This small garden stood out and made the area look bright and colourful.”

Wendy Ball was the recipient of the third prize of £25 and has developed her garden over several years.

The winning garden. (Image: Archant)

The council spokeswoman added: “This neat garden is a good use of space with colourful flowers and is attractive to birds which in turn help to keep pests off of the beautiful roses.”

Mrs Swallow said: “It was a very enjoyable competition, and the standard was very high.

“It was difficult to judge because we had different critera we had to think about, and us judges were surprised at the end when we looked at our marks for each garden, and we had very similar scores for the top three!

“The standard of gardens in Royston is high. There are some areas where people put extra effort into their gardens, but overall it’s good across the town and we hope the competition will be back next year.”