Gardening: Put a little Chelsea into your garden

But while the average gardener will be keeping busy, professional ones will be really feeling the pressure. During the last week in May, the great and good of the gardening world descend on the Royal Hospital, London, for the most famous flower show in the world.

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show can send garden designers' careers into orbit, and while the medals are being handed out, many of the plants and features that make up the stunning show gardens will be etched on to the public consciousness. In a new book, Take Chelsea Home, author and landscape designer Chris Young examines the ways in which we can take practical inspiration from the show.

If you've ever been to Chelsea or watched the television coverage, you might be thinking that there's no way you could recreate Diarmuid Gavin and Sir Terence Conran's Oceanico Garden, filled with metal mesh daisies, box balls and feathery grasses, or Andy Sturgeon's Cancer Research UK Garden, which impressed with its free-flowing oak sculpture and dense planting. So do gardeners need formal training to be able to create their own home show garden?

"No, not really – however, nine times out of ten it helps," says Young. He explains that the main difficulty for the untrained eye is to understand the spatial awareness needed in creating a garden – such as balancing planting, open and closed spaces, views in and out, and so on.

"This doesn't mean people who haven't been trained can't do it," says Young. "Clearly, some of the best gardens in the UK have been created by highly knowledgeable owner gardeners – but they are the lucky few. For the rest of us it takes learning and understanding to know why some areas of a garden work well together, and why others don't."

But even if the average gardener is unlikely to win a Chelsea gold medal, what they can do is get ideas, go away and digest these, then start exploring the ideas in their own gardens.

Flicking through the pages of Take Chelsea Home, with its photographs of gardens to please every palette, be it modernist, Mediterranean or just plain wacky, it's difficult not to be inspired. But these gardens are effectively stage sets, designed to provide the wow factor for just a few days. Young says that if you really love a particular show garden, it's worth bearing in mind that it shouldn't be slavishly copied. "Plants are often densely planted, as the designer will get marked down if bare soil is on display; and the plants are only on display for six days," he explains.

He points out that some plants are forced or held back, meaning that some of the flowering times are unnatural and the planting combinations wouldn't happen like that in the open garden.

However, he says that there are many combinations of two or three plants that do really work, and can be easily transferred to your garden. "My advice is to make a note of what you like the look of, and then go home and research where those plants are best grown in a garden," he says. "You can then work out if that combination will work in your plot."

One aspect that comes across in Chelsea show gardens is that they have a strong theme. Recent examples include the 2009 Future Nature Garden by Ark Design Management, which was packed with sustainable features including using drainpipes to direct excess roof water on to the planting below and a "living tower" using materials such as old bricks and wood to provide a home for plants and animals. Tom Stuart-Smith's Best in Show-winning 2008 Laurent-Perrier Garden won fans with its contemporary design, using cloud-pruned hornbeams and a limited palette of colour to create a calming space.

Young says your theme could be as simple as a "cottage garden look", "modern, clean and simple" or "jungle type planting in suburbia". "Whatever your preference or likes, just go for it," he says, "but try and stick to the one big idea. It really helps bring the garden together."

In terms of hard landscaping, designers at Chelsea are known for introducing new materials or using materials in innovative ways. Young says that for some years this innovation took the form of plastics and Perspex, used as water sculptures, seating, screens and containers. In other years, materials as varied as glass, perforated metal, rusting steel, recycled CDs and by-products of the timber industry have been used for planters, paths, walls and surface decoration.

"It may be a clich, but Chelsea is the garden world's equivalent of the catwalk," he says. "Many of the plants or landscaping materials you see at Chelsea you start seeing a year or two later in garden centres and DIY shops. Plant examples include Verbena bonariensis and Astelia chathamica; hard materials include different types of paving materials, stainless steel planters and fire pits."

When it comes to the cost of a Chelsea show garden, a designer will expect to spend somewhere in the region of 150,000. As this is most likely outwith the budget of the average gardener, can we reproduce the feel of a show garden without the price tag? "Yes, but as ever it is about the materials chosen, and how much you are prepared to do yourself!" says Young. "If you are a dab hand at building a shed, putting down some paving, building a raised wall or even constructing decking, then you can spend the rest of the funds on plants and hard materials.

"Also, most gardeners don't need to buy so many or such big specimens of trees and shrubs. This will really help keep the cost down."

Whether you are inspired to reinterpret some of the imaginative garden buildings and hard landscaping seen at Chelsea or just like a particular planting combination, this book can help you to turn your show garden dreams into a reality.

Take Chelsea Home by Chris Young (Mitchell Beazley, 16.99) is out now. To find out more about the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, 25-29 May, visit www.rhs. org.uk/chelsea

For a host of exciting new plant products,visit www.vanmeu-wen.com/scotsman

This article was first published in the Scotsman, May 8, 2010