Gold medal for the Brontës' Yorkshire Garden

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Good news: Tracy Forster's the Brontës' Yorkshire Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show has won a gold medal. As reported by the BBC News:

A garden which recreates the West Yorkshire landscape that inspired the Brontë sisters has won gold at the Chelsea Flower Show.
The Brontes' Yorkshire Garden by Welcome to Yorkshire features elements of the moorland characteristic of the Pennine Moors which surrounded them.
Designer Tracy Foster said it aimed to convey the emotional essence of the place that inspired the sisters.
[...]
The Brontë garden is based on a particular location often visited by the sisters, where a bridge now known as the Brontë Bridge crosses a moorland stream.
This is now a popular tourist destination, being located on the path to the location widely believed to be a key setting for Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.
Gary Verity, chief executive of Leeds-based Welcome to Yorkshire, said: "The Brontës' Yorkshire Garden will showcase to the world the wild and wonderful landscape of Yorkshire as a source of inspiration for some of the finest literary works of fiction.
"We hope it will encourage more people to rediscover this area of Yorkshire for themselves as well as seeing more of our county's wonderful gardens."

The Guardian's Northerner Blog has an article about it too:

But this year the Yorkshire garden at Chelsea has finally achieved its ambition, and been awarded a Royal Horticultural Society gold medal.
That's what the biggest and brashest of England's counties naturally expects; (actually – interesting fact - historic Yorkshire also contains England's second-biggest county: the West Riding on its own beats Devon, Lincolnshire and other such rivals). But the organisers made the mistake of not enlisting the magical powers of the Mighty Sisters until now. [...]
But at last, this year, Charlotte, Emily and Brontë appeared in a dream to Gary Verity, the chief executive of Welcome to Yorkshire which organises the garden, and said: "Daft ha'porth. It's us you need."
So it has proved. The massive metropolitan cliché mill grinds out unswerving descriptions of the sisters and their moors as wuthering and howling, but we who live here know better. Charlotte herself wrote of Emily after her death and how:
There is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of her
And Emily carolled in one of her perhaps less original poems:
May flowers are opening
And leaves unfolding free
There are bees in every blossom
And birds in every tree.
Anyway, Verity arose and his staff carried out the ghostly instructions, recreating the 'Brontë bridge' which crosses the Brontë beck by the Brontë waterfalls on the way to Top Withens (aka Wuthering Heights) above the sisters' home village of Haworth. They also crammed in a goodly stock of plants, making the composition more garden than artificial construction. [...]
Tracy Foster, the garden's designer from Leeds, worked closely with the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth throughout the project, describes how the garden tried to source materials from nearby, including boulders from Dove Stones moor:
The stone is beautiful. We have deliberately not cleaned it so it has aged naturally and it is of the period when the girls would have been walking around the Yorkshire Moors and writing their novels. The stone still has its original lichens and mosses attached which look just perfect in the garden and really give a sense of the beauty and bleakness that epitomise the wonderful moorland landscape.
She is properly over the moon, deservedly:
My first Chelsea and I get gold, it doesn't get much better than this! I'm so proud of what we have achieved. I hope the high profile medal inspires more people to come to Yorkshire to see for themselves the landscape that brought gold to the garden. (Martin Wainwright)

The news is also reported by ITV News (with a video clip), the Harrogate News and The Times.

The New Zealand Herald reviews John Irving's In One Person:

[Billy] reads omnivorously, starting as a 13-year-old with Fielding and the Brontës. (David Hill)

And Vanity Fair Daily quotes Jane Lynch (of Glee fame) on her own perfume:

“Because I play Sue Sylvester on Glee, I think people must think I smell like a boys’ locker room. And I would have loved to make that fragrance, but unfortunately Kim Kardashian owns the copyright.” Lynch also has ideas about what to call it, and the packaging. “How about Coach, by Jane Lynch. I’m Not Ellen, by Jane Lynch. Or my favorite, with a literary bent: Jane Eyre. And I don’t want one of those fancy bottles made of butterflies and ribbons. I want my fragrance in a Pez dispenser. Push back my head and the fragrance sprays out.” (Bennett Marcus)

The Telegraph publishes the obituary of Malcolm Fraser:

From the mid-1980s, Fraser was a regular visitor to the United States as a guest director — notably of the world premiere of Bernard Hermann’s Wuthering Heights for Portland Opera in Oregon.

Serendipia posts about Wuthering Heights in Spanish while Wintercrosspubs shares a recreation of Top Withins. Ingenious Art reviews Jane Eyre. Deslecturas writes in Spanish about both novels. Cazando estrellas posts in Spanish about Jane Eyre 2011 and Novellarella writes about Jane Slayre. My Favourite Things and More writes about Sarah Freeman's Brontë in love. Dyskusyjne Kluby Książki na Dolnym Śląsku writes in Polish about a recent discussion about the Brontë sisters.