GROUPS around town have been celebrating after winning some top accolades for their beautiful blooms. To find out more buy this week's Weston & Somerset Mercury………

GROUPS around town have been celebrating after winning some top accolades for their beautiful blooms.

Weston’s Flower Power Working Party bagged a prestigious Silver Gilt gong in this year’s South West In Bloom Awards.

Volunteers from the group travelled to Tregenna Castle Hotel in St Ives, Cornwall, for the presentation.

Flower Power Working Party chairman Richard Knowles said: “I am absolutely delighted with the result. There is only one way for us to progress and that is upwards towards gold.”

Hutton in Bloom also had reason to celebrate as it won a coveted gold award in the village category.

The group’s chairman, Adrian Wilmot, said: “We feel over the moon about this as we did about 99 per cent of the work ourselves after taking a break last year.”

The ceremony began with the Neighbourhood Awards, an initiative for small, resident-led communities just starting out on the cleaning and greening’ of their local areas.

While those entries were not judged against each other, they provided feedback and advice on how to develop current activities and encourage on-going improvements.

Both the Larch Centre on Baytree Road and St Martin’s Junior School won certificates for improvement and Castle Batch Primary School and Worle Community Centre received certificates of merit. Flower Power is a joint initiative between the Weston & Somerset Mercury, Weston Town Council and Weston Tourism and aims to create colourful displays across town all year round.