Newspaper Taxis

THE widow of Beatles star George Harrison has bought the star of this year’s Chelsea Flower Show.

The giant living sculpture, called The Dreaming Girl, is one of the enduring images from this year’s show and formed part of the Garden of Dreams created by St Ives garden designer Marney Hall.

The garden, Marney’s sixth Chelsea Show submission, won a coveted silver gilt medal.

Olivia Harrison is said to have installed the 15ft long, 6ft high sculpture at the home she shared with her husband George - a fantastical late-Victorian gothic mansion called Friar Park, located in Henley-on-Thames.

George died of cancer in 2001.

His fellow Beatle, Ringo Starr, is said to have snapped up two pieces from the showpiece garden - a gazebo-like “stumpery” made of intertwined driftwood trees and a wood carving of The Sleeping Lady.

Gardening fanatic Ringo, who wrote the Fab Four song Octopus’s Garden, and his wife, Barbara Bach, opened the 4Head garden at the show.

The garden featured 7,000 plants, healing herbs and a babbling brook.

The Dreaming Girl was inspired by the famous Mudmaid from the Lost Gardens of Helligan in Cornwall.

George was possibly the world’s first green-fingered rock star, although Elton John, Mick Jagger and Sting all shared his passion.

He was a regular, if discreet, visitor to Chelsea and occasionally other Royal Horticultural Society shows.

In 1980, when he published his limited edition autobiography entitled I, Me, Mine, he dedicated it to “gardeners everywhere”.

He meticulously restored the 30- acre gardens of Friar Park, including a 30ft model of the Matterhorn.