An East Yorkshire woman has won a major gardening award thanks in part to her imaginative use of junk.

Margaret Thomas from Pocklington has been named Britain's best new gardener in a contest organised by Garden News, a national weekly gardening publication.

When she moved to the town two years ago she set about designing and improving her new garden straight away.

And it was her natural artistic flair which helped her to produce a prize-winning plot, with driftwood, bottles, pebbles collected on recent holidays even some old wooden hula hoops being used to produce original features.

They are mingled with subtle colour combinations and the textures the plants themselves produce.

Margaret, 57, said: "My husband says that my plants should all have suitcases, because I have a habit of uprooting them at a moment's notice to produce the right effect."