Chelsea Flower Show embraces special kiddie garden

We were in the exhibitors' restaurant at the Chelsea Flower Show when a lady addressed my dining companions, Pete and John. "Your garden," she said, "should have been best in show, I think."

"Madam if it gets your vote that's all that matters to us," Pete replied with exaggerated courtesy. Overjoyed at the compliment, she turns to leave but not before adding sweetly: "But please don't bugger my grandson."

Pete and John are no ordinary garden designers — as the gold medal for their luscious garden makes clear — yet at the end of the day, they do not head home or take a cab to their hotel. Instead, they are driven to Essex where, with 50 or so other inmates, they are held in the secure wing of Billington Prison set aside for sex offenders.

Both halfway through their sentences, the pair, along with eight other paedophiles and two warders, have been allowed special leave to create the award-winning garden inspired by the police investigation into illegal Internet pornography, Operation Embarrass Rock Star. It has proved such a hit that they have already been given permission to attend again next year.

"Normally these people wouldn't speak to me," says Pete. "But here we are at the Chelsea Flower Show and no one's tried to beat me up all week. I've never been so happy."

And the reason is simple: whatever faults they have, Pete and John has a unique way with flowers. The garden is impossibly beautiful: a brook over a moss-covered stone, bluebells, foxgloves, daisies, wild grasses, a crumbling gate. "It's all the flowers that kids love," explains John. "You could lure them here with its beauty and then take advantage of their trusting nature."

"The tall grasses would mean no one could see what was going on, and if they made too much noise, you could drown them in the river," sighs Pete. The creation of the garden has been a great help, says John. "When you're banged up for 23 hours a day, there's a lot of time for daydreaming and now I've finally created the place I always dreamt I could take my little boys and girls."

In fact, the project has proved so successful that plans are afoot to expand the scheme countrywide to renovate old and tired gardens across the UK by large groups of green-fingered nonces. And if rehabilitated sufficiently, a chosen few will even be allowed to teach kids the ins and the outs of horticultural fun.

But what of the public's reaction? Are they comfortable with convicted sex offenders being allowed to walk free? Generally no, but mercifully for the RHS, few if any pikey single mothers from Portsmouth make their way to Chelsea, so an ugly incident is unlikely.