Category 1: small and container gardens; In association with armitage's

Huddersfield Daily Examiner (Huddersfield, England), July 23, 2008

1st Sue and Richard Taylor Bradley Grange

VISIT Sue Taylor's delightful garden at Bradley Grange and chances are that you won't want to leave.

There's something beguiling about the atmosphere created by Sue and her husband Richard in a peaceful wooded corner of the town.

First impressions count and as you walk down this drive, the attention to detail is immediate. Here's a corner you want to sit and linger in, your eye caught by wicker baskets brimming with pastel summer impatiens, gently swaying birdcages frothing with tiny flowerheads. Even an every day ladder is festooned with geraniums.

Sue's planting style is relaxed and informal, the colour palette largely pastel but with occasional show-stopping flash of red from nodding poppies.

Look closely and you'll see carefully positioned horticultural and household tools. Old mowers and a mangle find a new and perfect home in a garden which oozes charm and personality in equal measure.

Billowing perennial geraniums and columbines, gently swaying bronze fennel and towering foxgloves create waves of colour and movement.

Old wooden boxes, a bread crock, terracotta forcing pots, all provide character and reinforce the feel of a country cottagey garden that anyone would fall in love with.

Sue's day job as manager of the Textile Centre of Excellence's Design Incubator, says much about her commitment to design. Her garden, she says, is where she pours all her creative talents - and it shows.

But this garden, though its detail has the gloss of a magazine quality setting, has that irresistible extra, bucket-loads of love and affection.

2nd Leisha Kinnear Lepton

LEISHA Kinnear is a bright young mum with two sons and a busy family life.

She's also just 30, loves heavy metal music and confesses to a liking for some things Goth. Not perhaps the prime candidate to be a whiz in the garden then, but you'd be wrong.

"My friends call me a saddo for enjoying my garden but I love it," she says.

And the garden that she, husband David and children Kyran, six, and Taylor who is three, all share proves that there is not age barrier to being a star in the world of horticulture.

Leisha's part-time supermarket job leaves her plenty of time to spend in the neat plot tucked away behind the family home at Lepton.

A Jolly Roger flag flies on the miniature house which signals the boys' corner of this very family orientated garden. It even sports the number 66A, an echo of the Kinnear's own house number.

Here the boys play with their trucks in the gravel, keep an eye on their own patch of ground and make sure that friends don't kick their footballs on mum's flowers.

Leisha's green-fingers probably came from her gran who is also a gardener. But her design skills, her eye for colour - there are striking combinations of bronze foliage plants and even black grasses, their dramatic effect lightened by touches of white, silver and blue - are all her own.

"I like to see different shades of green and I like unusual things. I like to bring things back from places like Harrogate Flower Show that maybe other people don't have."

She has canaries in large cage outside the back door, has bird feeders around the garden and is working hard to create the kind of environment that will bring still more wildlife into the garden.

As to those friends who think her passion for gardening is just a bit unusual for someone her age, guess who are the ones who like to sit out there!

3rd Diane Gibson Paddock

DIANE Gibson continues to put the wow into window boxes.

This is the human dynamo who gets a whole community gardening. If you didn't have a window box when you moved into the Paddock street where Diane and her mum are neighbours, then you soon will have.

For Diane, and a few like-minded residents are doing their best to give their whole community flower power. And it seems to be working.

For one thing, you can't miss the homes of Diane and her mum. In a terraced street not far from the town centre, this infectious gardener has packed boxes, baskets and flower pouches with enough blooms to stop the traffic.

Painted pots and paper flowers on an inner passageway wall mean that nothing stops this house blooming all year round.

Behind the family's home, more than a hundred pots ensure that wherever the eye turns, it's hit squarely by colour.

"I just love to flower things up," says Diane who when she is not looking after her mum and two teenaged children works at a local post office.

She's recently discovered solar lighting and now enjoys her garden even in the dark. "I sometimes come out here in my dressing gown, sit on the seat and look at the flowers or wander around and do a bit of dead-heading. I just love it.

This year she's had great success with sweet peas as well as every kind of annual you could name and next year - she aims to add more fruit and vegetables to her basket grown strawberries.

You get the impression that nothing will stop this bundle of gardening energy.

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