HERB nursery owners Paul and Chris Turner are celebrating after taking top honours in their first ever Royal Horticultural Society show.

The pair, who co-own Garth Cottage Nursery at Newby Wiske, fought off international competition to win the Best Exhibit prize at RHS Harlow Carr.

The couple first started exhibiting at smaller shows around a year ago and winning a clutch of Golds encouraged them to go for the big prize at Harlow Carr.

Their show garden consisted of culinary herbs in asymmetrical boxes and Mr Turner said: “We expected and we hoped to do quite well, we thought maybe silver, perhaps gold, but we didn’t expect to get best exhibit by any means.

“We are a bit stunned but the judges really loved it, we got ‘excellent’ across all the categories.”

The Turners have been running Garth Cottage Nursery for the last 20-years and are specialist growers of culinary herbs.

The nursery grounds are not open to the public and instead the couple take their herbs to farmers markets and country shows to sell.