To the fallen of the First World War, the Chelsea Flower Show

Birmingham, May 20: Even the Queen of

could not believe that a floral tribute to the martyrs of World War could be this beautiful and realistic. As she was guided through the real-like trenches and shown the flowery bullets and the guns, she admitted that peace and beauty prevails all. The memories were sombre, but the representation was beautiful.

The sandbags, the floral mud and the metal rats were all replicated from the time of the World War. The inquisitive queen looked through the trench periscope and asked whether everything that was replicated were used in reality.

Darren Share, Birmingham's Head of Parks explained that a real trench would have been higher, narrower and full of mud. He also explained how alternanthera plants had been used to replicate mud in the trench.

Some of the other theme-based gardens that the Queen visited were Alan Titchmarsh's Britain in Bloom garden, the Telegraph garden, The Soldiers' Charity No Man's Land Garden. In the latter, celebrities like Rowan Atkinson and others read war poems to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War.

One of the soldiers who helped design the garden was Chris Parrott, 25, who was shot in the leg on his first tour of Afghanistan in 2005 and suffered a sharpnel wound to the brain during an ambush in Helmand.

He was medically discharged and now hopes to become a landscape gardener after studying horticulture with the help of ABF. He described the creation of No Man's Land as "an emotional experience". [For more: Read]

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