Green-fingered West Lothian students get national prize

Nov 5 2009 by Marjorie Kerr, West Lothian Courier

A TEAM from West Lothian reaped the success of their labours when they won a top prize.

The trio from Oatridge College in Ecclesmachan, were named Britain’s young Champion Landscape Gardeners for 2009.

Students Colin Smith and Petri Jacobs, coached by lecturer Brian Miller, now stand a great chance of being picked for the UK team to compete in the prestigious World Skills competition in London in 2011.

The pair triumphed in the final of the advanced section at Malvern, south of Worcester, by creating a 7x7 metre garden to a design brief over three gruelling days of hard and soft landscaping.

Their gold medal follows the bronze won by fellow students Scott Cousins and Daniel Scott in the intermediate final earlier this month at Windsor.

Coach Brian Miller says: “Colin and Petri simply outshone the three other teams in the final.

“The quality of their work was fantastic and they actually finished early enough to help another team complete their garden.

“They got into the last four against 38 teams from colleges in England and most of them stayed on to see Oatridge carry the flag for Scotland. It was a great moment for us.”

Colin Smith (23), from Blackburn, is in the final year of his Modern Apprenticeship with Premier One, one of Scotland’s leading landscaping contractors, who was over-all runner-up in this year’s Lantra Scotland Landbased Learner of the Year Awards. He is in the final year of his studies at Oatridge.

Petrus Jacobs is South African-born but has adopted Scotland as his homeland since arriving on a working holiday in 2001. From 2003 he has studied agriculture, agricultural engineering, horticulture and currently landscape management at Oatridge, being named Best Studen” several times. He works on the Harburn Estate in Mid Calder.

The Oatridge teams went through to the UK finals by winning both the Intermediate and Advanced competitions against opposition from elsewhere in Scotland and North Ireland at the Gardening Scotland show in the summer.

Colin and Petri will honoured for their success at an awards dinner at the Grosvenor Hotel in London in early December.

The competition was organised by the British Association of Landscape Industries (BALI) on behalf of UKSkills.

The biannual WorldSkills competition attracts around 1200 contestants from 40 different industry sectors in 50 countries.

David James, the principal of the college, said the college are proud of the team.

He said: “To win a gold and a bronze is amazing and reflects well on the quality of students and tutors.”