Our giant pumpkin squashed a world record!

After 50 years of persistence and near misses, British twin brothers Ian and Stuart Paton have finally beaten the Americans with their homegrown ginormous gourd. ADITI RANE gets the inside scoop on how they did it

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N A vast, humid greenhouse on the edge of the New Forest, two men stand in quiet triumph beside a pumpkin so enormous it looks as if it's been plucked from a fairy tale. Its skin is a mottled, sun-warmed orange, its curves so immense that the greenhouse door barely cleared it on the way in. Weighing 2,819lb, the equivalent of a small car, it sits on a pallet lined with carpet, like a pampered pet.

This is Muggle, the world's largest pumpkin. And the men beside it, twin brothers Ian and Stuart Paton, of Lymington, Hants, have just done what no Briton has managed before: they have beaten the Americans at their own oversized game.

"It's taken 50 years," Ian told the Daily Express, his voice a mixture of pride and disbelief. "We've had seasons where every pumpkin split. One year we even grew a record-breaker, but there was a tiny hole, and we were disqualified. But this year... well, this year was ours.'

At 64, the Paton twins are wiry, weathered men who talk about pumpkins with the kind of reverence poets reserve for love. Their journey began in childhood, when their father ran a flower business from a patch of land behind the family home.

"We were always out in the garden," Ian recalls. "One summer, we planted a few pumpkin seeds. We were probably the only kids who wanted to get back from holiday to see how big our pumpkin was. It weighed 56lb, we thought it was massive."

He chuckles. "And that's how it starts. You catch what we call pumpkin sickness. You're inflicted for life."

THE Patons' greenhouse is a cathedral of horticulture. Sunlight streams through high windows and illuminates the dense, curling green of the leaves and vines. Each plant sprawls over 1,200 square feet, roughly the size of a small one-bedroom flat, and drinks up to 130 gallons of water per day.

Every vine is buried to encourage extra roots and each flower is hand-pollinated and covered with care to prevent cross-contamination.