Beyond the pale

Designer: Stephen Firth & Brinsbury students

A contemporary courtyard garden, using modern elements such as stone filled gabions as boundaries. Buff sandstone, reclaimed paving block and timber struts give structure, softened by planting of mature shrubs, grasses and herbaceous plants in bronze and purple.

The Philosophical Garden

Designer: Andrew Loudon

Andrew Loudon is a dry stone walling master craftsman. The centre of the garden is a stone sphere, sitting opposite a negative image of itself, recessed into a slate stone wall. A curved path winds up to a small seat, positioned on a pebble mosaic. All this is surrounded by dense herbaceous planting.

Courtyard garden

Designer: Beth Houlden and Louise Elliott

A nostalgic cottage garden, with a country feeling using local materials and simple design, with emphasis on the plants. A real team effort from members of this local village horticultural society, all plants will be grown in members’ gardens and reused by them afterwards.

A Shady Courtyard

Designer: Fiona Bruce

An old stableyard conversion nestling somewhere amongst the fields and woods of the Thames Valley forms the backdrop to this small plot, which shows that tiny and shady doesn’t have to mean dark and dank, and that limited space can still accommodate a garden to satisfy a plantsman and nature lover.

The Cumbrian Fellside Garden

Designers: Kim Wilde & Richard Lucas

A garden for quiet contemplation carved out of a sloping plot of land in a fellside setting. Cumbria’s romantic landscape is the inspiration for this garden, and a rivulet falling from the fell is harnessed as a simple water feature.

Julie Zeldin Landscape & Garden Design

Designer: Julie Zeldin

Inspired by the WB Yeats poem, the garden is a richly textured tapestry of colour and surface. The garden evokes remembered landscapes, damp and dry, light and shade, while the turf seat echoes those days spent lying on the grass and looking up to the sky in contemplation, reviving the spirit in an urban setting.

Chocolate Garden

Designer: Landscape Management Services/Home Group

Inspiration for this garden comes from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Paving in the garden represents the shape of a cocoa pod and some of the plants have a chocolate scent.

Work, Rest and Play Graden

Designer: John Gilbert

Traditional pub table skittles is the unusual focal point in this urban space, where the most is made out of a small outdoor area to enable the owners to work, rest and play in soothing surroundings.

Peace is Special

Designer: Jennifer Hirsch

Oak Lodge is a school for children with a wide range of complex learning difficulties. Their gardening programme was so successful that they were inspired to submit a design for Chelsea.

Orangenbleu Room to be Free

This garden is divided into three clearly defined areas with a 2m (6.5ft) high rear wall painted a strong and dominant crimson.