DORSET Cereals has scooped a gold medal and award for the Best Courtyard Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show.

The Poundbury-based firm took the honours for its entry, Dorset Cereals' Edible Playground.

It tied in with a trailblazing scheme called Edible Playgrounds' to encourage schools to create food-producing gardens.

The winning garden was designed by Nick Williams-Ellis and was created to inspire schools nationwide to build their own vegetable gardens within their grounds.

Dorset Cereals director Patrick Horton said: "We are absolutely delighted to be presented with a gold medal for our garden at Chelsea and to have won the award for Best Courtyard Garden.

"Massive thanks go to designer Nick Williams-Ellis, the construction team at Marshall James and growers at The Gardens Group for their imagination, dedication and hard-work.

"We truly hope that our Edible Playground garden at Chelsea will help to show schools how their playgrounds can be turned into a growing vegetable and fruit garden, ultimately encouraging children to learn about food.

Dorset Cereals was one of three winners of gold medals in the Courtyard Garden class. But it also claimed the show award overall for Best Courtyard Garden. Just seven top awards for category winners were handed out at the prestigious show.

The garden featured edible plants offering colour, texture and taste for schools, from bulls blood beetroot to thornless blackberries, alpine strawberries and Corsican mint.

A gnarled apple tree that gave shade to a children's garden bench was thirty years old and was lifted from a Dorset orchard not far from the home of Dorset Cereals in Poundbury. The Gardens Group grew a range of vegetable plants to fill the beds of the garden, but not all the plants were professionally grown.

Some of the plants were grown by the Gardens Groups young Garden Gang members. Beetroot was also grown by young gardeners from Thornford School's gardening club and this was planted in pride of place in the Edible Playground garden. Wheat, grown by Pearce Seeds of Sherborne was carefully delivered and planted.

The Edible Playgrounds' project is a Dorset-born initiative that provides schools with gardening equipment, seeds, experience and information to help them establish a food-producing garden.

The scheme was launched as a community project in May 2007 by Screen Bites: Dorset's Food Film Festival with four primary schools.

Dorset Cereals has pledged its involvement in the scheme.

In 2008 it will be supporting more than 100 schools, helping them to put Edible Playgrounds into their grounds and they will be tracking progress over the next three years as the project develops. There is also an interactive website www.edibleplaygrounds.co.uk to give adults and children ideas to start their own Edible Playground.