This year is is a vintage Chelsea. Let’s hope it won’t be the last given the hoohah by local residents who are trying to make the show’s organisers, the Royal Horticultural Society, apply for planning permission. If they get their way the residents will terminate a world-class show and a tradition that began in 1913.

This year is high quality, elegant and restrained with a few garish exceptions which won’t get a look-in on these pages.

Here are the top ten:

1. Shao Fan’s Chinese garden, which dips down into a sunken pool and up to cliff-like walls waving with grasses and foxgloves. It’s genius. It conjures up a cool, mountainous landscape in Chelsea’s overcrowded, overheated city site. The planting is a laid-back mix of pine, Osmanthus, bamboo, tree peonies, Hemerocallis minor (syn. H. graminea), waterlilies, Liridodendron, Spiraea, trilliums, grasses, ferns and orchids.

2. Cleve West’s BUPA garden. This garden, like all Cleve’s work, is subtle and pleasing. The deeper you look the more pleasure you get. He’s used little curves of hedging to break up the space and make comfortable secluded spots in a relatively small area. The huge concrete ball makes a focus and made me want to go and stroke it.

3. Balls are big in Diarmuid Gavin and Terrance Conran’s garden, too, where Diarmuid’s signature box-ball planting undulates beneath mesh daisies and then under a dense canopy of high-pruned laurel with a circular sunshine gap over a small terrace.

4. Paul Kensey’s Pemberton Greenish’s retreat. This is a lesson in small-space gardening. Like so many of this year’s gardens it has been dug down to make a sunken garden. But Paul has also gone skywards with walls in wood blocking – very tactile – and a rusted steel back wall planted with birches. Water trickles over slabs of stone and recycled glass. LED lighting in the pool, under steps and through the recycled glass gives a magic effect in the evening.

5. Ian Dexter, designer of this year’s Marshall’s garden. He is a rising star and his pavilion, at the back of the garden, is especially brilliant. The timber uprights at the centre make a climbing frame up to the top level (one in the eye for Health and Safety I feel). The uprights created by the pavilion’s timber frame create a stunning vertical pattern against the black and painted bamboos outside.

6. Peony Kokuryu-nishiki. This made its debut in 2005 and it’s still a show stealer. The flowers are lusciously striped in magenta and white.

7. Andy Sturgeon’s unusual walls made from aluminium circles. They give glimpses of his lushly-planted Cancer Research Garden.

8. Tom Stuart-Smith’s garden is as elegant as ever with a canopy of poodle-pruned hornbeam over rectangular tanks in which water seems to hover a few millimetres above the rim. This ingenious effect is created by an black rectangular block within the tank over which water flows – a masterpiece of hydo-engineering.

9. The scent of David Austin’s latest rose introduction, Young Lycidas. It is a big, blousy, free-flowering magenta flower and is on my Christmas list.

10. The Marshall’s design forum. Chaired on alternate days by James Alexander Sinclair and me, we have some of the world’s top designers and plantspeople giving their secrets away almost ever hour of the day. Tickets are free and we’d love to see you.

Explore Gardens

• Hampton Court Palace Flower Show

• Chelsea Flower Show

Times recommends

• Here comes the glass sun – garden honours Beatle
• Gardening tips: 10 things to know about Horny Goat Weed or Epimedium
• Diarmuid Gavin shares tips on how make your garden fun and funky