The problem with display gardens at garden shows, even the best garden shows, is that they are far from real.
I have seen 10 or 20 euphorbias planted in a row to fill space and create the impression of a low hedge formed from an abundance of beautiful variegated foliage.
In reality this could never happen. Planted in a real garden, the euphorbias would quickly smother the space and grow too tall and massively bushy.
The same applies to trees and shrubs. I have seen rows of birch trees planted a couple of feet apart or dozens of hydrangeas crammed into a tiny border just for the sake of visual impact at the show.
It is also not at all unusual to see plants put together in combinations that are totally impossible, such as roses with witch hazel or delphiniums with snowdrops.
So what's the value of these kinds of displays?
Well, the best defence is that these exhibits are not intended to be taken literally, but are merely designed to inspire and stimulate the imagination.
Another argument is that fantastical displays are a way to get people excited about a particular plant -- by drawing attention to it by displaying it in a dramatic fashion.
Botanical purists are not so sure. Critics of topsy-turvy planting schemes say the best kind of display is one that is as close to reality as possible, showing plants in natural combinations and as they really are in terms of their size and shape as they would be at maturity and always shown in a seasonally appropriate scheme.
Even the world's most prestigious garden show, the Chelsea Flower Show, struggles with this issue.
Over its 90-year history, it has hit a winning formula of producing sensational display gardens that try as best they can to be not too outlandish with planting schemes without squeezing all the fun and fantasy out of it. Chelsea gardens cost, on average, between $200,000 and $300,000 to produce.
Britain's TV and magazine garden guru, Alan Titchmarsh, addresses the issue right up front in the foreword to a terrific new book, Best Garden Design, by Chris Young (Firefly, $35) on the most exciting and inspiring ideas from the past five Chelsea shows.
Of course, it's not real. Gardens that appear in three weeks, then disappear overnight, cannot possibly be genuine, he says.
But that doesn't mean they are incapable of inspiring you, spurring you on to do better.
Titchmarsh admits the Chelsea show can leave people feeling inadequate, but he argues this needs to be offset against the show's ability to fire my enthusiasm and renew my passion for gardening.
This could also be said of Best Garden Design, an inspiring and beautifully organized work that compresses scores of great design and planting ideas into a few well-defined chapters, focusing on everything from planting ideas to art in the garden to innovative use of a wide range of materials.
Chelsea is famous for the sophistication and intelligence of its displays and these qualities are evident through Young's book, with page after page of tasteful landscaping ideas.
For instance, there's a graceful, curved, low-level wall like a horizontal question mark, with café-style table and chairs at the centre and a surrounding border containing blue Siberian irises and white foxgloves.
From the 2009 show, there's an elegant row of pleached lime trees in a garden of neatly clipped yew, box and rosemary hedging that demonstrates how restful and serene a restrained composition with a minimalistic treatment can be.
Imaginative innovation has always been a hallmark of the Chelsea show.
In Best Garden Design, there's the Oceanico Garden from 2008, with its whirling, white, butterfly-wing-like umbrella canopies that hover over a planting of sculptural boxwood balls interplanted with Mexican feather grass and purple alliums. In the evening, the white netting of the canopies is turned purple by strategically placed spotlights on the ground. The effect is to transform the garden into a fantasy world that would be ideal for a party.
Glass, plastic and assorted industrial materials -- pipes, planks, bricks and metal boxes in a range of colours and shapes -- are worked into chic displays calculated to thrill and stimulate.
But the playful inventiveness is always done with a good-humoured style and suavity intended to evoke admiration and amusement rather than shock and alarm.
So you find aluminum tubes of various size stacked to form a low wall behind a border of green ornamental grasses next to rising, pure-white stone steps.
And there's a planter composed of rectangle metal heating ducts stacked as a wall feature and cut and stuffed with soil and elegantly planted with purple pansies.
No one does water like the designers at Chelsea and there is no shortage of brilliant ideas for water features in Best Garden Design.
Rather than rough and rustic, most of these feature smart, contemporary, slick and sleek installations in which water gushes, bubbles, spouts or slides smoothly and precisely into beautiful and artistic bowls, troughs, basins or sunken pools.
One of my favourites is a garden in which a short jet of water rises inside a square metal container tightly enclosed by a double layer of box hedging. A similar idea features black, metal, cube-shaped containers filled with water to create flat surfaces that reflect the sky and bring light to the ground.
When I was at Chelsea this year, I spotted other brilliant water features, including metal, tree-shaped sculptures that literally rained down water and created mesmerizing pitter-patter patterns of raindrops on the flat surface below.
A major component of any Chelsea show, of course, is the focus on top-quality plant materials and flowers at their absolutely most perfect.
It would be unimaginable for flowers not to take pride of place, says Young in Best Garden Design. Whether rare or unusual, in the Great Pavilion or show gardens, they often make the gardens. From modernist designs using lines of hedges to cottage-garden combinations crowded with irises or roses, Chelsea's displays satisfy the need to be inspired.
Chelsea always makes big use of alliums and foxgloves, irises and rogersia, lady's mantle and verbascums.
Some of the most attractive displays are simple green and white landscapes. Which is exactly what Tom Stuart-Smith did in 2008 to win the best-in-show award with his garden for Laurent-Perrier with masses white-flowered astrania, Asarum europaeum, small-leaved hostas, rogersia and tightly clipped trees and boxwood. White, rectangular zinc containers with black interiors filled with water added repetitive structure throughout the garden.
In another white-and-green-themed garden, the vertical lines of white-trunk birch trees are underscored by masses of rogersia. In a grey-and-white scheme, the silver foliage of verbascum is offset by white-flowering scented stock, Matthiola incana.
Some of Britain's top garden designers and commentators -- Bunny Guinness on conservation pits, Nigel Dunnett on drought-tolerant planting, Tom Stuart-Smith on cloud pruning among them -- offer fascinating ideas and tips we can all apply to our gardens.
All in all, Best Garden Design is a fun way to see what Chelsea has had to offer over the past few years and pick up some wonderful ideas on the way.
-- Postmedia News
