Read about the Chelsea Flower Show

The opening day of the 23rd Malvern Spring Gardening Show provided the ideal conditions - blue skies and bright sunshine – to enable Hartpury College’s Mediterranean Terrace Garden to look completely at home in the 68-acre showground at the foot of the Malvern Hills. The students’ design, vibrant with bougainvillea, hibiscus and callistemon against a backdrop of whitewashed terrace walls, was one of the 16 gardens to win a medal at the show’s most successful year ever for RHS awards.

Malvern is a particular favourite with nurseries, and the RHS has to turn away more applicants for this show than at any of the others, mainly because the showground is easy to access and there is space in the roomy 1.6-acre Floral Marquee to sell plants as well as display them. For the visitor it offers a spectacular setting, a chance to see spring planting both in the show gardens and on the stands and to buy from a number of nurseries who show only at Malvern, and to meet local producers and craftsmen and see floral art displays.

This year Malvern is the show of choice for both Claire Austin Hardy Plants and the Cottage Herbery which won Best in Show for the most creative display with its giant trug planted up with a medley of familiar and unusual herbs (such as wasabi and silver-leaved buckler leaf sorrel), all grown organically. For the first time the iris grower Claire Austin chose Malvern over Chelsea this year. “Chelsea has several people showing large bearded irises,” she said, “but Malvern gives us the chance to show the standard dwarf ones, which are ideal for small and for windy gardens.” Her display includes a wide range of these jewel-like early irises, from the original cultivars with floppy falls (outer petals) that were bred in the 1950s to newer ones, such as the exquisite blush-pink ‘Charmed’ or dusky purple ‘Ruby Contrast’, which have more upright falls that allow you to see the full beard from above.

Family-run local nursery Grange Farm is showing a range of spring shrubs and perennials, including a trio of Floribunda wisteria – one white and two lilac - which the long-serving RHS judge Lawrence Banks pronounced the best he has ever seen in a show. Isle of Wight Lavender has created waves of Stoechas varieties in a setting of rustic barrels and tubs. Edrom Nursery from Berwickshire won a gold for its harlequin display of woodland flowers that includes the unusual new primula ‘Francisca’ with pale green flowers sporting a lime-green throat. Aquilegias in a wide range of shades feature on several stands, with Robert Iddon’s doubles in white among the most striking. Avon Bulbs is offering an exquisite new Solomon’s Seal, Polygonatum x hybridum ‘Betberg’ with purple-flushed stem and leaves, and the new heuchera ‘Georgia Peach’ from Terra Nova Nurseries, with leaves that change from peach-orange in spring to rose-purple in autumn, is available on several stands. Heucheras are one of the dominant plants of the show, and many of the gardens featured dark varieties, such as ‘Obsidian’ and ‘Plum Pudding’.

Malvern is traditionally a springboard for first-time designers, and this year many of the 16 gardens displayed a tasteful but unadventurous palette of purples, blues and pinks. But the Best in Show design, Susie’s Garden by Sue Jollans, used an exuberant mix of oranges, purples and claret flowers interspersed with tawny grasses. The gold-medal garden, made in aid of the Meningitis Trust and in memory of a friend of Jollans who died suddenly of meningococcal septicaemia ten years ago, is an inspired children’s garden, incorporating a trampoline sunk into the top of a grassy mound with water rills, a shallow pool, and hideaways, that would also give pleasure to plant-loving adults. Follans sourced the plants herself, grew them on in a borrowed polytunnel and juggled with the difficult conditions of a mainly cold and wet April which led to only three of her 35 poppies blooming in time. With the confidence of a true oldhander - although this is, in fact, her first show – she replaced them with Erysimum ‘Apricot Delight’ which, ideally fits her colour scheme as its flowers open from purplish buds to rich orange blooms. James Steed’s Outdoor Living Space, also a gold medal winner, is a contemporary design using decking and an internal wall made of an attractive timber alternative (manufactured from recycled plastics and rice husks) that complements the flint-filled gabions and galvanized steel planters and the grasses and textural plants such as phormiums and astelias .

Younger visitors to the show will be intrigued by the ambitious design of 15-year-old Jack Dunckley which represents a march through time in England. The Sussex schoolboy is still too young to enter the Hampton show, which was his original ambition, but with a bronze under his belt for his Malvern design, and encouragement from the designer Chris Beardshaw who has set up a four-year mentoring scheme for entrants to the Malvern Spring Show, he has firmly set his sights on Hampton for 2009.

Malvern Spring Gardening Show, The Showground, Malvern, Worcs, today and tomorrow (10, 11 May), 9am-6pm. Tickets at the gate. www.rhs.org.uk, www.threecounties.co.uk