Our top picks: Chelsea Flower Show’s award-winning gardens

GOLD MEDAL AND BEST IN SHOW

The Morgan Stanley Garden

Anyone who complains of having a shady garden will change their tune after seeing the magic worked here by designer Chris Beardshaw, who has taken a tricky brief — to evoke the emotional journey of a child seeking help from the NSPCC — and created a luscious, opulent woodland garden full of solace.

From Himalayan poppies to shadeloving peonies (yes, there is one, peony obovata) and bright blue Chatham Island forget-me-nots, there’s colour and surprises everywhere if you look closely.

​Beardshaw admits choosing a rhododendron is risky in a show garden — “It’s a love/hate plant” — but the gorgeous pink yakushimanum “Fantastica” is most definitely a hit.

GOLD MEDAL

The Wedgwood Garden

“This is a garden for a strong, successful woman — I didn’t want to make it fluffy,” says its designer Jo Thompson. There’s nothing fluffy about this sculptural bronzed-steel pavilion, which curves over a babbling stream, planted with irises, trollius, geums and primulas amid a calm backdrop of willows and acers. But it wasn’t easy to build.

“I knew how I wanted the structure to flow but it travels in all directions so the department of engineering at Cambridge University helped me make it actually stand up,” she says.

It’s a calm, contemplative garden where you can just imagine yourself scrambling up the stream bed to sit on the rocks with a book — an enticing prospect after battling the crowds here.

GOLD MEDAL

The M&G Garden

Rammed earth walls and Mediterranean planting makes for a scorchio combination in Sarah Price’s parched masterpiece. Price, back at the show after eight years away, says she took her inspiration from Monet, and there’s definitely an artist at work in the luminous planting and series of framed views as visitors walk around the garden.

Gnarled pomegranate trees, crepe myrtles and twisted cork oak give the space the air of longevity, and there are loads of drought-tolerant plant ideas here for Londoners with sunny, well-drained gardens, including the plant of the show, the delicate pink Beth’s poppy, named after the late plantswoman Beth Chatto.

GOLD MEDAL

The Urban Flow Garden

Londoners will get plenty of ideas in Tony Wood’s clever garden in the Space to Grow category, from a polished concrete kitchen, salad on the walls, covetable lounge furniture by Ethimo and permeable Vande Moortel paving that directs excess rain into tree pits covered with beautiful laser-cut, rust-coloured grilles by Stark & Greensmith.

Bronze porcelain tiles and rusted metal is picked up in the metallic shades of planting including beautiful delicate pink rosa glauca and the first multi-stem gingko ever to feature at the show. Instead of pleached trees, which take water away from other garden plants, Woods delivers a sense of privacy with cantilevered, laser-cut half-arches that cast beautiful shadows.

A garden you want to live in.

SILVER GILT

The Lemon Tree Trust Garden

Richmond boy Tom Massey is a Chelsea first-timer but this garden, inspired by the resilience of Syrian refugees living in a camp in northern Iraq, is an assured, uplifting debut.

Pomegranate and lemon trees and joyful planting of red poppies papaver glauca, milk thistle and anchusa azurea “Dropmore” (blue is a big colour at the show this year) surround an Islamic-themed central fountain trickling restful water that then heads under the trees in triangular rills. Revolving shutters shade a verandah, and around the walls and even on the roof are vegetables and herbs growing in tin cans, gutters and plastic bottles — to reflect the ingenuity of those living in the camp.

SILVER GILT

The Silent Pool Gin Garden

Come home from the office, meander across the weathered oak decking around the infinity pond and lift the lid of your ice bucket, made from a copper still (natch) to pour a refreshing G&T. David Neale, in collaboration with Silent Pool Gin, has created just the sort of garden you want to come home to: restful multistem trees over loose, colourful planting including angelica, camassias and anchusa. Londoners with shady gardens will be taking note, especially of the large, coppery DesignClad porcelain tiles that would transform any ugly wall.