Green fingers reaching for the stars

25 Jul 2013

Jodrell Bank inspires award-winning gardens

The Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre has inspired a host of award-winning gardens at this year’s Tatton Flower Show.

The Show featured four ‘Galaxy Gardens’ inspired by the Centre’s own Galaxy Garden, all of which won Gold Medals.

They were Mike Russell's The Star Gazer's Retreat, Howard and Dori Miller's Watch This Space, Leon Davis and Brendan Vaughan's Gravitational Pull and Peter Styles' Life on Enceladus.

The Star Gazer's Retreat is a woodland glade which houses an observatory, while Gravitational Pull, which also won Best Galaxy Garden, centres around a wooden black hole.

Life on Enceladus was inspired by the recent news that one of Saturn's moons could be a home to life forms and Watch This Space looks forward to an event later this year, when a huge cloud of dust and gas will encounter the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

The Centre’s team is at Tatton Flower Show all week, showcasing the work at Jodrell Bank – home to the iconic Lovell Telescope – to around 80,000 visitors.

They include TV gardener Monty Don, who looked at sunspots and solar flares using the special Solar Telescope in the Jodrell Bank area (pictured).

Centre Director Dr Teresa Anderson said: “It’s a different – and really lovely – way to engage people with the work we do. The gardens that have been inspired by Jodrell are a sight to behold and help us even further in engaging the public with the University’s world leading research.”

The Cheshire show was first held in 1999 and created by the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) as a "sister to Chelsea and Hampton".

For more information visit Tatton Flower Show.