BEST back garden

What a bumper crop of back gardens – and the winner is a case of back to the future.

Jeanette Clayburn and Mark Giles

understand plants and their clean design reflects how gardening style and our use of outdoor space has changed over the last 20 years.

Winning best back garden, their plot in South Shields, Tyneside, began as a boring blank canvas. So the lawn was ripped out and 19 years later it has bananas, tree ferns, tomato trees, and brugmansia around a summer house and ponds. Even turtles live here.

Jeanette and Mark show how even small gardens in suburbia can transport you to different lands.

Other gardens of note include that of

Jackie Whitaker of Carlton, Nottingham. It features geraniums and salvias but the real success is sharing the plot with nine whippets and lots of wildlife which inhabit the pond.

Valerie and Philip Cook of Ripon, North Yorks, have tamed a steep bank and turned it into a thing of beauty crammed with colour, especially through spring and summer seasons.

Another garden that has a similar approach was sent in by Jason Myers of Douglas in Cork. Also on a slope, it has been turned into a stepped jungle with sub-tropical species that survive due to the ocean’s warming effect.

Wooden railway sleepers are invaluable and plants used include dwarf palmetto trees, under-planted with Chamaerops humilis, hart’s tongue and shuttlecock ferns, Woodwardia, and a collection of canna lilies.

I also loved the bountiful borders sent in by Heather Canham of Lincoln. She loves agapanthus, Queen Victoria lobelia and rudbeckia. I can see this plot dances into autumn.

Another cheerful garden came from

Barrie Clark of Barnsley – his dad and two uncles were show judges and he has carved a neat display from an old orchard that was knee high in grass and nettles.

Philip Canter’s garden in Chippenham, Wiltshire is planted in the cottage style. He moved his veg to an allotment 20 years ago and focused on flowers. His stars are clematis and climbing roses with clouds of perennials and annuals.

Jeanette and Mark’s tropic oasis

Jackie Whitaker shares plot with nine dogs

The Cooks’ terraces of colour are a thing of beauty

Barrie Clark likes to keep things neat

Philip Canter’s immaculate cottage-style garden

Jason Myers has a stepped jungle slope

Heather Canham’s bountiful plot