Towthorpe recycling site wins award for brightest garden

Site operatives at Towthorpe and Strensall Household Waste Recycling Centre created a garden plot on the way into the main facility and collected the inaugural 'Yorwaste in Bloom' award.

The commercial waste management company said a number of its sites across North Yorkshire entered the in-house contest.

John Gowlett, Paul Handy and Brian Cuthbert started planting in November last year during their breaks, by utilising materials, seeds, bulbs and other resources brought in by the public.

The garden is on the approach ramp to the site (Image: Kevin Glenton)

John said: “As we were checking the skips and everything else, you’d see some bulbs, so you’re like ‘we’ll plant these and see what they are.’”

Apart from the odd purchase, the team had no idea what would bloom and blossom after first planting.

Paul said: “We bought a fuschia and a couple of geraniums, and everything else, we find.

"We’ve got a tub that’s got bulbs ready for next year that somebody’s left.

“We don’t know what we’re getting. We planted one down at the bottom, it’s nearly finished now, that’s lillies, but we didn’t know that.”

Potatoes, tomatoes, green beans and peas are also amongst the items in the ground, although they’re not quite ready to harvest.

All of the pots, features and trinkets are also donated – including a pink flamingo which arrived in two bits before John glued it back together.

Three other examples of the team's lucky dip planting (Image: Kevin Glenton)

John has been working at the site on Moor Lane for more than a decade, and Paul just over a year, and both have been taken with public response to the plot created to dimensions that contest rules allowed.

John said: “We’ve got a little lad who comes down, he’s really interested in gardens.

“We had a big strawberry, like a planter, he was so interested in it, having to take the stuff off to make things grow.

“So we gave him it, and he keeps coming back and saying ‘oh, I’ve got this growing, I’ve got that growing’."

Alan Craven, from Wigginton, was leaving the site and lowered his car window as he stopped near the winning garden.

He said: “I’m often here, bringing garden stuff that won’t go into the green bin.

“It makes for a nice entrance – it looks tidy.

“Pleasant that somebody makes an effort to keep the place clean and tidy.

Garden sizes were determined by contest rules (Image: Kevin Glenton)

A spokesperson from Yorwaste said: “By their nature, these centres are industrious work sites and not usually pretty to look at.

“Tasked with re-using materials brought in along with our Yorganics compost, teams at the sites set about building their floral sites.”

The judge, Kerry Green, contracts and compliance manager from North Yorkshire Council said: “Towthorpe just edged it because of how it looked and the variety of what they were growing.

“They had made the best use of limited space and were growing a range of flowers, a potted apple tree…I even saw the remnants of strawberries!”

A site in Tadcaster was second and another in Whitby came in third.