CHESTER gardens at this year’s RHS show at Tatton Park are of gold standard.

Chester Zoo’s Dinosaurs at Large! garden, in the back-to-back-garden category not only won a prestigious gold medal but was also voted best garden in its category by Royal Horticultural Society judges.

Mark Hargreaves, team manager, horticulture and botany, said: “We are over the moon.”

The garden represents the environment and plants that existed when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Mark added: “The garden includes the Wollemia nobilis pine which was extinct until four years ago when it was rediscovered in New Zealand.”

Ledsham designer Dori Miller also won gold for her design of Oxfam’s show garden called When the Waters Rise created to highlight the charity’s campaign for better ways to grow, share and live together. The garden showcases floating gardens and willow baskets designed to be raised above the flood line.

Dori, an amateur gardener, first designed at Tatton in 2010 when she won silver for her back-to-back garden to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Chester choir, A Handbag of Harmonies, with whom she sings. The choir was at the garden at Tatton yesterday to sing a specially created anthem, by musical director Matt Baker and writer Helen Newall, to reflect the garden’s theme.

Dori, a teacher, was ecstatic to hear she had won gold. She said: “I designed the garden in solidarity with women working in adverse conditions across the world. When I was digging wet mud to plant I was doing it to win a gold medal. Women in other parts of the world are doing it to scratch a living.”

Other medals include a silver-gilt flora for Grosvenor Estate’s Painting with Plants and a silver flora medal for Chester Cathedral’s The Psalm.

Mouldsworth garden designer Sally Parkinson received a bronze flora medal for A Breath of Fresh Air for the charity Respiratory Education UK.