The district’s towns and villages will be represented at Chelsea Flower Show, with a garden designed to ramp up the anticipation for next summer’s Tour De France.
Tourism agency Welcome to Yorkshire will have a garden at the show in May and is using the opportunity to showcase the landscape that the world’s best cyclists will be riding through a little over a year later.
In January the Tour De France revealed the route its Grande Depart would take, and it included Keighley, Ilkley, Haworth and Silsden.
Designed by Alistair Baldwin Associates, based in Bedale, the garden will be seen by the show’s thousands of visitors. It evokes the more rural parts of the route, including the rolling hills, hay meadows, dry-stone walls and agricultural drinking troughs of the Yorkshire Dales.
It features sheep grazing as a peloton of cyclists, represented by an installation of cycle wheels, rush past.
Many of the towns and villages along the route are named on a water feature in the garden.
It will be one of many ways in which the organisation promotes the Yorkshire leg of the Tour, which is expected to bring tens of millions of pounds to the local economy.
Welcome to Yorkshire hopes the garden matches the success of previous entries. Last year, they made Chelsea Flower Show history by becoming the first exhibitor to win the People’s Choice award three years in a row.
Gary Verity, chief executive of Welcome to Yorkshire, said: “Once again we feel we have a creative and unique garden entry, capturing Yorkshire and Le Tour together.
“It will also be a great launchpad for our Yorkshire Gardens campaign and continue to help put Yorkshire’s great gardens firmly on the map.”
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