A TEENAGER needed a wheelbarrow to transport all his silverware home after winning seven trophies at Ambleside Horticultural Society’s Summer Flower and Produce Show at the weekend.

Fourteen-year-old Alex Jackson, of Ambleside, who earned the most points in the show, is the third generation of the green-fingered Jacksons to scoop the silver.

Nobody would have been more delighted at Alex’s success than the Society’s President, Peter Howarth, who sadly died a week before the event.

Paying tribute to him at the award ceremony, Chairman David Capstick said it had been one of Mr Howarth’s passions to encourage young people’s entries in the show.

This year’s growing conditions, which ranged from “baking hot” and “bone dry” to “wild, wet and windy”, challenged the gardeners, not that this showed in the quality of this year’s entries.

Winner of the Blue Ribbon award for best horticultural exhibit in the show was a giant pot leek grown by James Park. The versatility of competitors was a hallmark of the Ambleside’s impressive event.

This included Ambleside Judy Fry’s outstanding entries which excelled in all floral art classes, as well as Jean Sowerby’s “toilet brush holder” flower display and Jo Jackson’s garden flowers in an antique asthma inhaler.

Children and young people’s classes displayed plenty of sibling rivalry, with Isaac Hodgson’s hens collecting handfuls of first and second prizes in egg classes, and awards also for his sister and brother, Annie and Samuel Hodgson. The Chen family of Peony, Oswin, Albion also won several awards, including the most points in children’s classes for Oswin.

Veteran show exhibitor and former judge of Cumbria in Bloom, Councillor Leslie Johnson, who presented the prizes, praised gardeners for beating the changeable weather.

WORDS BY JANE RENOUF