Green-fingered students hoping to bloom at Chelsea

A GROUP of green-fingered students are putting the finishing touches to their garden design which has earned them a place in the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show.

The gardening design students won the right to display their work at the annual show at the end of last year and have been working tirelessly to perfect their creation in time for this year's event.

They are thought to be the first students in Scotland to have won a place at the show.

After more than a week spent at the site constructing their "21st century croft" garden and up to 20,000 spent on their creation, the team are almost ready to wow judges with their efforts in a bid to pick up a prize in the courtyard section of the coveted show being judged on Monday.

The Sustainable Highland Garden design is a contemporary adaptation of an ancient Scottish way of life and aims to promote biodiversity and renewable energy.

The garden boasts a wildflower roof, solar panels and a wind turbine and provides ideal conditions for birds and insects, including the bees from the croft's hive.

It also features an organic vegetable garden and herb area and has a mechanised screen separating the garden from the Scottish landscape at the back, which has a mountain spring and a small loch.

The panels on the screen turn to allow the sunlight to stream into the garden and to protect it from the wind.

One of the 12-strong team, Paul Lyall, 39, from Restalrig, said transporting their garden from Edinburgh to the show has been a "logistical nightmare" and constructing it in just over a week has been a challenge for the students.

He said: "We've been working every day from about seven in the morning till seven at night.

"We can only have five people working on it at a time so we're operating a rotation system to do the work.

"In some ways it has been intimidating to see how well the other ones round about us are doing but we're not really judged against the gardens in other categories.

"I wasn't confident when we were first on our way down because of the logistics of it all and what we were up against but that changed once we started to build it. It looks great and my confidence is rising.

"We are not expecting gold but we would hope to get some award."

The students – who only entered the competition after coming up with the idea as a joke in the pub – will be taking their design to Gardening Scotland in Edinburgh after the Chelsea Flower Show.