A quick glance outside and I thought, at last, here is a Chelsea Flower Show I can relate to

When designer Jonathan Snow was being interviewed on the BBC coverage about his goldmedal winning garden featuring plants from Craigieburn, he rattled through some of the plants that were vital to the scheme.

“I’ve used persicaria, Japanese anemones and hypericum,” he told the interviewer.

A quick glance out the window was all that it took to confirm that all three were growing cheek-byjowl in my own garden.

Finally here was a Chelsea Flower Show that I could relate to, where the show gardens along Main Avenue actually resembled the sort of plot that most of us have at home.

The style this year was natural and almost haphazard, although it takes supreme skill to make a garden that’s been created over 10 days resemble one where the plants grow in the sort of happy tangle that takes years to achieve.

So what were the stand-out elements of this year’s show?

Well the first would have to be Persicaria Firetail, which popped up in almost every garden. With its long stems of tiny red flowers that start appearing in mid-summer and keep going right into autumn, this was already one of my favourite plants and if you don’t have it in your garden then you are going to have to be quick off the mark because I reckon that nurseries are going to sell out fast as a result of its popularity at Chelsea.

The second most striking feature about this year’s show was the absence of dahlias. It had been predicted that these bright stunners would dominate, but apart from the occasional low-key variety growing amongst grasses, they were almost absent from the show gardens. Does this mark the end of the dahlia’s current wave of popularity? Not for most gardeners, but it is a sign that the cutting-edge designers have moved on.

And what is their new obsession? Well that would have to be ferns. These appeared, in one form or another, in almost every garden. They filled the gaps in shady areas under trees, flourished in the damp areas around ponds and appeared from the cracks in walls that appeared ancient, but which in fact were still being built while the Chelsea judges were approaching.

Green was the dominant colour of this year’s gardens with flowers taking a supporting role to foliage effects. Hawthorn popped up in several places and Japanese anemones were used as much for their abundant leaves as for their flowers.

One popular perennial however was astrantia and if viewers of the BBC’S show coverage were puzzling over why the astrantias at Chelsea were still flowering long after their own had gone over, then that’s because one variety, Astrantia Roma, is the pick of the professionals – favoured for its extra-long flowering period.

This year’s crop of show garden designers made it look easy, but achieving this kind of artful informality is the hardest trick of them all, but by borrowing some of their planting and design ideas we can all be inspired and our own gardens up a notch or two.