Mother's sunflower garden in memory of her daughter wins award at Gardeners' World Live
A special sunflower garden created by a mother in memory of her daughter has been praised by judges at Gardeners' World Live.
Every year Andrea Childs grows the flowers in memory of her daughter Beth, who tragically lost her life to leukaemia in 2018, aged 20.
Andrea, who lives in Kingswinford and is an ambassador for Cure Leukaemia, harvests and sells the seeds to raise money for blood cancer charities.
She was offered the chance to design a garden and tell Beth's story at the Gardeners' World Live event, which took place at Birmingham's NEC last week.
"Working with garden designer Dani King, we wanted to base the garden on a teaching and children theme as Beth was in her second year of primary education/teacher training when she lost her life to leukaemia," says Andrea.
"We created a school forest garden where the imaginary children are planting sunflower seeds, learning about how plants grow and painting pictures of sunflowers.
"The garden was awarded a special award by the BBC judges, The Community Endeavour Award, and the judges commented on how moved they were by the passion, feelings and love the garden created."
Sunflowers are very special to Andrea. Not only were they Beth's favourite but in 2019, the year after she died, a friend of Andrea's, Rachel Lord, whose son was battling the same disease, grew some sunflowers in her garden.
She kept the seeds from those original flowers and gave Andrea a packet to grow the following year.
From those original flowers, Andrea has grown hundreds of plants each year and collects the seeds to resell for Cure Leukaemia.
Sunflowers that Andrea had been growing and nurturing since March took pride of place in the Gardeners' World Live show garden and she says they proved a great hit, with many visitors who could spot the towering five-foot flowers from afar.
Famous visitors to the border garden included TV gardener and presenter Carol Klein, who chatted to Andrea, her brother Steve and friend Justine for over 15 minutes, asking about Beth, her story and the sunflowers, and also former Wolves footballer Geoff Thomas, who is a leukaemia survivor and a Cure Leukaemia patron.
"We shared sad and happy experiences with many members of the public across the four-day show and by selling Beth's sunflower seeds and other sunflower merchandise raised over £1,000 for the charity," says Andrea.
To purchase sunflower seeds, visit cureleukaemia.co.uk/sunflowerseeds or bethssunflowers.co.uk.
