Gardening: Scotland's annual show promises to run the gamut of design

While visitors can relax and enjoy the sights and sounds, by the time the gates open the exhibitors and garden designers will be breathing a sigh of relief. Show manager Jim Jermyn has the job of making sure it all runs like clockwork. The show organisers, he explains, have just seven days to get everything in place.

"That involves getting 300 exhibitors onto the site and offloading hundreds of thousands of plants from vans and trucks," Jim says.

Despite the pressure, be assured it will all look perfect in time for the opening.

The show gardens are among the best-loved features of the Gardening Scotland event – and this year there will be more of them than ever.

Dougal and Lesley Philip of New Hopetoun Gardens are designing a special garden to publicise their annual Avant Gardens Festival. Their garden has an unusual theme – it's designed as if for a retired expat returning from Indonesia to Edinburgh with treasures that have to be accommodated in a rather small space.

"Last autumn, we found some amazing carved, recycled teak artefacts and these became the starting point for our design," says Dougal.

Measuring just four square-metres, the treasures are set against a backdrop of lush, hardy plantings that look exotic but which will survive in Edinburgh, so you can expect bold leaves, bamboos, bright foliage colour, splashes of bright flowers and burgeoning beds of plants.

"Creating the garden is exciting," adds Lesley, "especially the planting, because you are arranging plants to create a perfect picture and often arranging them next to ones you haven't put them next to before."

Alongside the Philips' garden, there is a varied selection of other design treats in store. Dave MacIntyre of Var Scotica is a regular exhibitor who specialises in growing Scottish wildflowers. His garden won best in show last year with its swathes of meadow. This year he is returning with a Victorian-themed garden.

Landscaper Eoghann Watt will be demonstrating the link between a home and its garden for the Ross & Liddell One Stop Property Shop Garden. Centred around a mock residential block, he'll be including brightly coloured planters and quite possibly a wheelie bin planted up with flowers. Other gardens to enjoy include the low-maintenance City Slicker Garden by Primo Landscaping and the Rock & Shell garden by Rococo Gardens, which shows off plants that will thrive on the east coast of Scotland.

Carolyn Grohmann of Secret Garden is the designer behind the Water Gems Brewin Dolphin Reinforcing Nature Garden. She says the inspiration behind the garden is our fascination with the juxtaposition of a man-made industrial material and natural planting.

"A woven ribbon of steel reinforcing bars (Rebar] winds its way through a reflecting pool, over a deck and folds back on itself to create a shelter at the heart of the garden," she explains. "In and around it grow clouds of colour, shape and texture in the form of herbaceous plants, ornamental grasses and ferns.

"The garden illustrates how man-made and natural materials and elements can combine to create something both elegant and beautiful."

This is a garden filled with texture, including the deck and screens made of decking larch boards, a sculpture created from steel reinforcing bars woven together in basket weave, a green roof mat on the shelter, plus plants including knautia, scabiosa, primulas, hostas and ferns.

Carolyn says they have been working on the garden since last autumn and, for the last couple of months, it has taken a huge amount of time to put together the Rebar sculptural centrepiece. These efforts have been recorded and the process of putting the garden together can be viewed on the website, www.reinforcingnature.org.

Students of horticulture aren't left out this year, with a number of colleges creating imaginative show gardens.

Scottish Agricultural College student Amber Goudy will be taking her 21st century croft garden to the Chelsea Flower Show before taking it all apart then putting it back together again at Gardening Scotland. "There's a croft at the centre of my garden and I've had to build two because the Chelsea site is sloping while at Gardening Scotland it will be level," she says.

Making sure plants flower on time is always a challenge for designers and for Amber it is a greenhouse full of wild harebells that hangs in the balance. "With some plants you can keep taking off early buds to control the flowering time," she says, "but with harebells there's nothing you can do to slow them down except reducing the temperature."

While it'd be easy to while away the hours enjoying the Show Gardens, there is plenty more to see at Gardening Scotland.

The Dobbies Floral Hall provides access to top growers and nurseries from across the UK, including real-life plant hunters such as Sue and Bleddyn Wynn-Jones of Crg Farm Plants who travel around the globe on their quest for new plants. Expect also to be wowed by the floral displays from groups and local authorities such as Edinburgh City Council, which will be using a model of a Spitfire and lots of red, white and blue plants to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.

The Living Garden is the place to go for ideas and advice about eco-friendly gardening, with representatives of 20 environmental organisations providing tips and demonstrations. Then there are the miniature Pallet Gardens and the BBC Scotland Beechgrove Theatre which gives visitors access to the TV gardening team.

By the end of your visit, expect to be weighed down with plants, gardening kit and a head buzzing with design ideas to take home to your own plot.

4-6 June, www.gardeningscotland.com

This article was first published in The Scotsman on 22 May.