The themes for this year’s Chelsea Flower Show centred on diversity, the power of plants and their impact on the everyday lives of people. Skilled garden designers and expert growers illustrated the themes with sleek and sophisticated show gardens and fabulous plant displays.

It was at dawn on the morning of what was later to became an unusually hot summer’s day that Geoff Redman and I found ourselves at the Bull Ring Gate, waiting to enter the 2010 Chelsea Flower Show. Geoff was bogged down with cameras and lenses, and I was in a state of delirious excitement.

We both knew that behind the high fences would be the flowers and display gardens that dreams are made of. The two representatives of your favourite gardening magazine used up all of about five seconds to re-group once allowed inside the hallowed grounds. The emotional one, who simply adores flowers, cried a whole box of tissues to pulp because the moment was just too big, while the other boldly joined the ranks of the crème de la crème of the world’s press and television camera crews. And that was how you now get access to the latest and hottest news on the English gardening front.

Hot in 2010!
For nearly a century of shows (88 to be precise), the Chelsea Flower Show has been the originator of gardening fashions and trends that are closely studied and adopted by gardeners across the world.

The look for 2010 is simple, sleek and sophisticated, without being 'over the top'. Designs incorporating eco-friendly and organic concepts are still prominent, but the recession, the rustic look and the intense focus on recycling, all themes of recent years, are on the backburner.

The house and the garden are incontrovertibly 'married', with indoor elements displayed outside and the outdoors brought inside. Designers use modern all-weather furniture and ornaments to create the most wonderful outdoor rooms for entertaining. They are decorated in the finest detail, just as one would expect to see in a grand drawing room inside the house.

Outdoor living is easy and friendly! The hothouse or conservatory is no longer the sole preserve of cosseted plants – it is still used for propagating, but also for entertaining and even as a home office.

There is simply no excuse not to grow your own food. Instead of rustic, concealed veggie patches there are smart planting boxes, and lots of ideas for vegetable containers that can supply a family with fresh edibles, even from the smallest of city garden.

Your country needs you … to plant lots of flowers again! Show gardens are smothered in perennial colour – supplied by trusty old favourites like irises, aquilegias, verbascum, lavenders and forget-me-nots. Colourful hybrids of the floriferous South African osteospermum are everywhere.

The fashion colours are deep purple, lilac, blue, burnt orange, bright orange and buttercup yellow. White gardens with lots of greenery and just a hint of pastel shades here and there are still hot.

Planting combinations are textured and layered, with dainty flowering perennials mixed in between graceful wild grasses.

Meadows are big news! Carefully sown to look natural, they supply habitats for butterflies, bees and other wildlife. Even the most formal and controlled gardens sport a little patch of meadow somewhere.

Vertical gardening has gone over the top. Garden designers are using every trick in the book to plant up a wall. Some were covered in herbs, others in moss, still others in dainty ferns and groundcover daisies, while quite a few were clad in synthetic lawn (which, of course, requires no maintenance – except the attention of a vacuum cleaner now and then).

Paving with quality materials like sandstone tiles, marble slabs and mosaic is in. Subtly-coloured cement slabs, especially biscuit beige and light charcoal, feature 'all over the show'.

A feast for the eyes
The Children’s Society Garden
Designer: Mark Gregory
Contractor: Landform Consultants
This stylish garden was designed for the modern family. Every element of it is intended to make the young crowd happy, enticing them to spend quality time at home with family and to relax in the garden with friends.

Foreign & Colonial Investments’ Garden
Designer: Thomas Hoblyn
Contractor: The Outdoor Room
The field-like layout of the garden was planted in a colour palette consisting of bronzes and shades of verdigris green, interspersed with fiery accents. Still pools connected by a scalloped flow-form introduce the element of water and cool the garden. The many lovely ideas and superb plant combinations would suit any gardens in warmer climates.

The Daily Telegraph Garden
Designer: Andy Sturgeon
Contractor: Crocus.co.uk
The design of Andy Sturgeon's garden was inspired by his travels and combines aspects of the Cape’s fynbos, the maquis shrubland of the Mediterranean, the chaparral of California and Mexico and the matorral of central Chile. Although the planting has an exotic air, it is tempered with more familiar English plants that light up the garden with colour.

The L’Occitane Garden
Designer: James Towillis
Contractor: Peter Dowle Plants & Gardens
James Towillis used key plant species from the warm, sunny climes of the South of France and the Mediterranean to evoke the wildness of the landscape of Provence in this garden. The plants include structurally appealing olive and almond trees, and iconic lavender cultivars. The planting is framed by original Provençal props, a water irrigation feature, and structures built with a new 'rock-scape' material introduced at Chelsea this year.

Laurent-Perrier Garden
Designer: Tom Stuart-Smith
Contractor: Crocus.co.uk
This garden, a vision of romance and elegance, consists of a central pavilion, constructed of patinated copper plate, that overlooks an elongated pool of water. The pool and pavilion are surrounded by spring woodland plantings: a grove of birches, cloud-pruned box, fresh white flowers, grasses, euphorbias and blue IRIS sibirica.

Our boys were there
Cheerful and colourful, the stand's special displays highlighted the genetic diversity of South Africa's plant genera. It used endemic plants to illustrate all nine biomes.

We loved this!
The Living Office – grow your lunch
Integrating plants into the office makes for a healthier and more sustainable environment. This exhibit demonstrates a ‘working’ office environment with integrated planting. Close inspection reveals that the propagator growing vegetables for lunch is heated by the computer fan; the fish tank is a grey water filtration system; and a compost bin recycles waste and provides ambient heating.

Celeb watch
Press day, which is also preview day for the lucky, attracts droves of celebrities, including rock stars, actors, TV presenters, fashion models, beauty queens, writers and royalty. Some are avid gardeners and others attend to see and be seen. This year it was the great cooks of the world who enjoyed icon status. The stands where they demonstrated their skills (cooking up a storm!) attracted hordes of adoring fans and photographers.

Jamie Oliver cooked … we enjoyed
Jamie Oliver cooked up the most delicious pizzas in the outdoor pizza oven in The Children’s Society Garden and we were lucky enough to take a bite … most scrumptious!

Bill Bailey cuddling his name-sake
The Borneo Exotics stand illustrated the enormous diversity in size and form, from the delicately small to the monstrously huge, within the carnivorous genus Nepenthes that is found mainly across South East Asia. Nepenthes are fragile, slow-growing plants and many species are severely threatened by habitat destruction. The newly created hybrid NEPENTHES ‘Bill Bailey’ is named in honour of the well known UK comedian. Bill and his wife, Kris, put a considerable amount of their time and resources into various conservation and animal welfare efforts.

Fun in the sun
The Chelsea version of 'dop and chop' is ice-cold Pimm's and juicy fish and chips. The visitors, especially some well-dressed mature ladies, were seen to guzzle the former by the jug full.

Greenhouse gossip
“They call this sausage? I definitely see a business opportunity of a real boerewors kind here at Chelsea for us, you guys!” – yours truly on inspecting my lunch.

“The best thing is that the pretty girls always seem to travel in pairs. Great!” – The Gardener’s photographer in pensive, appreciative mood.

Something to ponder on
"Biodiversity can only be maintained by not wiping out the habitat!" – this was written somewhere at the show, and it's well worth all of us remembering and thinking about.