A saboteur in the shrubs takes rival's hanging baskets

Days before judges arrived to examine Mrs Mills's award-winning floral display, her hanging baskets were snipped off and stolen.

On the same night, two tubs from her front garden and a number of potted geraniums and pelargoniums also went missing.

Mrs Mills, 81, first thought thieves had pinched her pride and joy to sell at a car boot sale.

Her beautiful flowers and plants are well known in the area and would fetch a good price.

But the crime had its roots in more sinister soil.

For the past two years Mrs Mills has won an award in the best small town garden section of the In Bloom competition - and someone didn't want her to make it a hat-trick.

Soon after the theft on Thursday last week, she received a phone call. The female voice on the other end of the line said: "You will not win for a third time." Then they hung up.

"I have never known anything like it," Mrs Mills, of Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, said yesterday.

"It is a bit nasty considering it's only a competition.

"As a family we thought someone had taken them to sell at a car boot sale but when I had this call I knew it couldn't have been."

She added: "The baskets were definitely there that evening because I remember watering them.

"Whoever took them must have had some wire clippers because the baskets were tied to the hangers by wire.

"Soon after that a lady, on a withheld number, called saying I will not win the competition for a third time.

"I was going to pull out because I was so upset, but everyone I told kept telling me not to give in."

She added: "Everyone who passes says the garden is really pretty, so I don't know who would do something like this."

Yesterday, as the In Bloom judges assessed this year's entries, Mrs Mills feared her chances of a title were slim. This is not the first time entrants of the competition have fallen victim to jealous rivals.

Last year, Peter Dungworth thought the daffodils he had planted on grass verges around his home would help the quaint Domesday village of Harthill with Woodall, near Rotherham, win the competition's small village section for the first time.

But on the eve of the judging he discovered every single flower had been beheaded by a secateur saboteur.

Police immediately launched an investigation amid claims that meanspirited rivals from a nearby village may have crept in under the cover of darkness.

Mr Dungworth, a retired salesman and father of two, said those behind the attack deliberately used secateurs in an attempt to scupper the village's chances of winning the competition.

He estimated that he had planted about 5,000 daffs by the time they were unceremoniously snipped.

"It took somebody or several people a few hours to carry out the work," he said at the time.

"The flowers weren't just pulled up. They were carefully snipped off, almost professionally, with secateurs, and the yellow flower heads were left where they were cut."

Locals in the nearby village of Thorpe Salvin, which has won the competition's small village section three times, denied any wrongdoing. But those behind the attack have still not been caught.