FORMER TV presenter, actress and model Kate Durr has won a major prize at one of the UK’s leading horticultural shows just months after starting out on a budding new career in garden design.

The 47-year-old Malmesbury mother-of-three was 'thrilled silly' after achieving a Best Festival Garden award at the 2015 Royal Horticultural Society Malvern Spring Festival.

Mrs Durr, formerly Kate Charman, had earlier been awarded £3,000 with which to create a garden at the prestigious four-day event, attended by around 90,000 people earlier this month.

Calling her garden Constraining Nature, Mrs Durr, whose actor husband Jason Durr is best known for his role as PC Mike Bradley in TV’s Heartbeat, filled it with 'sensual contrasts' that swirled around a statuesque feature wall of steel panels.

Designing it was one thing, but turning her drawings it into a reality was entirely another. “It was a very big undertaking,” she said. “I arrived at Malvern to find a bare brown patch measuring five metres by 3.5 metres.”

Working with a professional contractor she spent many long days at Malvern before rushing home to Malmesbury every evening to tend to the needs of her young children.

“It was hard work juggling the garden with the children,” she said. "I was feeling my way all the time working on the garden at Malvern.”

She was delighted with the progress as her as her allotted strip of earth slowly bloomed into a majestic, eye-catching creation. Having first been awarded an RHS Gold medal by the judges she was then stunned to have won Best Festival Garden.

Mrs Durr, who as a child growing up in Malmesbury recalled spending hours lovingly tending her own little plot that her parents had given her, said: “I was absolutely chuffed to bits when the judges said I’d won.

“I was really surprised. I couldn’t believe it. It was the most superb outcome I could have wished for.”

The category in which she triumphed was introduced last year at Malvern to inspire and encourage up and coming landscape designers to create a show garden.

She won the chance to take part in the internationally renowned show after being urged to submit an entry by Caroline Tatham, her tutor at the Cotswold Gardening School at Gossington, where she is studying for her gardening diploma.

Mrs Durr, who once modelled for the Pretty Polly hosiery company and hosted ITV’s Guinness World Records, has had three offers for garden design work since winning the best garden category.

She is also getting back in front of the TV cameras…hosting a show on garden design.