Gold award for green-fingered students

A garden designed by two students at Hadlow College and inspired by Kent's mining heritage has won gold at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show.

The Green Seam garden, designed by Stuart Charles Towner and Bethany Williams, tells the story obehind the Betteshanger Sustainable Parks project.

The area offered few job prospects for the former miners despite the promises of successive governments.

Both students are on the Garden Design BA (Hons) course at Hadlow College.

The garden was constructed by RDC Landscape Design and Construction and features a black wall representing the coalface; coal pillars depicting the miners and their heritage and a lift cage symbolising the miners’ daily descent below ground.

The planting scheme features the vivid pinks and greens of pioneer plants, some of which are rare, showing how they can colonise previously damaged ecosystems, in this case the spoil heaps from the Betteshanger Colliery, and transform them into places of beauty.

Steel structures and metal cables support climbing plants to reflect the shape of the colliery pithead, while black opaque glass pillars represent the future.

Work will shortly get underway on the first phase of the project with the building of the energy efficient Visitor Centre at the Betteshanger Country Park, which is managed by Hadlow Group.

After the show, the garden will be relocated to Betteshanger Sustainable Park and reconstructed near the site of the Kent Mining Museum, part of the visitor Centre, where it will be enjoyed by many thousands of visitors every year.