OUTDOOR spaces at Dartmoor Prison are getting a makeover thanks to work by inmates who are turning concrete into cabbages.

Fresh from their success at the Chelsea Flower Show where prisoners from the resettlement unit at Dartmoor helped win a silver medal for the Eden Project's 'Places of Change' show garden, the green fingered inmates are busy building, sowing and planting.

The prison has strong links with Eden which has assisted prisoners to grow vegetables for the local community through supplying all their seeds, compost, fertiliser and many materials.

The gardening bug has bitten and Dartmoor's austere structure has now been softened with plants.

Prison officer in charge of gardens Kristian Preece said the experience of Chelsea had been 'indescribable'.

Some 500 people from 45 homeless hostels and seven prisons were involved in the award-winning garden, which was the biggest ever seen at Chelsea.

The overall theme of the garden was craft and enterprise and the importance of teamwork, which was reflected in a number of specially designated zones such as crops and food, floristry and leisure and medicine and health.

The display featured a 'green man' made of hundreds of healing plants grown in the precise bodily regions to which they bring benefit, to symbolise nurture and well-being, industry and manufacture, and conservation and the environment.

There was also a complete greenhouse made out of plastic bottles. All of these acted as a metaphor for new skills and the journey embarked on by the individual to get there.

Mr Preece said he worked with prisoners every day and saw the benefits of gardening in raising self-esteem but to see the work put in on the Chelsea garden was amazing.

He said: 'It was brilliant to see that these people, who have had such a devastating life, have so much to give back.

'There was a considerable amount of effort that went into it and I think we all got an awful lot out the experience.'

Aside from working on the garden at Chelsea, Dartmoor Prison supplied hundreds of vegetables for it. On a day to day basis vegetables grown at the prison are given to residential homes in the village and to elderly residents.

Everything that can be is recycled and stone is used from the Dartmoor Prison estate to build raised beds, water features and structures.

Prisoners have even honed their gardening skills to create an exercise yard with grassed areas and stone walls, and the flower beds each side of the walkway inside the prison would do justice to any stately home.

Exercise, a sense of purpose and achievement and skills to use in the outside world are the advantages to the gardening project at Dartmoor. It is one of many initiatives at the prison designed to reduce the number of people re-offending once they leave.

The category C prison (for prisoners who cannot be trusted in open conditions but who are unlikely to try to escape) has recently launched a computer training programme which gives a recognised qualification at the end, the 'Toe to Toe' programme to help prisoners who cannot read or write.

Other programmes include VIPA, the Veterans in Prisons Association, to identify the specific problems experienced by ex-forces prisoners.