Toucan Design has helped the National Trust to pick up a major prize at this year’s IVCA Clarion Awards. ‘A Plant in Time’, an exhibition celebrating the diversity of plants growing in National Trust gardens and how climate change may affect them in the future, was highly commended in the interactive category.

Supported by Yorkshire and Clydesdale Banks, ‘A Plant in Time’ highlights that there’s no better place to start making a difference than in private gardens, demonstrating simple ways people can reduce their impact on the environment and help secure the future of the plants that make gardens special.

The Clarion Awards recognise best practice in communicating the importance of corporate social responsibility, diversity, sustainability, community development and health.

Toucan Design produced a stunning exhibition which is touring National Trust properties nationwide this year. The exhibition has proved so popular that it will now continue touring until November and will appear at Castle Drogo, Drewsteignton near Exeter on October 20-22.

The centrepiece is a spectacular display of flowers made from recyclable materials which grows in size as people add their own flowers to the exhibition in different venues.

Toucan’s Creative Director Josh Beadon said: “We’d never had a challenge like it! Our brief was to create a beautiful and thought-provoking public exhibition using only sustainable, recyclable or reusable materials.”

Old wellies, local wicker baskets and galvanised watering cans were among the materials used alongside thousands of brightly coloured paper flowers made by exhibition visitors.

Josh added: “We are delighted that these prestigious awards recognised the vision of exhibition project manager Laura Hetherington and the realisation of our design team.”

Laura Hetherington, Devon-based Arts and Heritage consultant who worked with the National Trust on the project, said: “We are all delighted with this recognition of our ambition to create an exhibition which was fun, engaging and participatory and also helped to change people’s behaviour. Developing an exhibition which grew as it toured, and involved visitors themselves, was an exciting challenge.”

Marco Forgione, IVCA Chief Executive, commented: “This year’s IVCA Clarion Awards winners have once again demonstrated the high levels of creativity, innovation and best practice in ethical and inclusive communications which are a true inspiration to all of us in the visual communications industry.To qualify as a finalist is an excellent achievement. Congratulations to all of those who were shortlisted and of course many congratulations to A Plant in Time for their excellent and much deserved winning entry.”

The IVCA Clarion Awards were launched at Parliament in 2003 and have been widely endorsed. Past winners range from BP, Barclays Bank, and Honda, to the achievements of BBC Two series It’s Not Easy Being Green, BBC Radio, An Inconvenient Truth, Billy Elliot the Musical and the National Theatre.