CHELSEA OPENED its gates to the usual twitter of excitement, giving me a chance to catch-up with old friends like Helen Mirren, as well as the likes of actor Terence Stamp and Sarah Kennedy, my favourite Radio 2 presenter.
Apart from tripping over the mass of celebrities, I was there looking for inspiration, and it was the show gardens that I concentrated on, designed by some of the country's leading garden designers.

Those of you who prefer more traditional garden styles would be alarmed by the great deal of post-modernist design present this year; gardens were groaning with concrete, glass and stainless steel. I can easily see these thought-provoking gardens belonging to a modern public building or in an atrium, but cannot see them in an average domestic setting. But they do make you sit up and think which is, presumably, their raison d'être.

And that is precisely why HMP Leyhill's garden, "Time the Healer" (RGB6), designed by the staff and inmates of the prison, came as such a pleasant change. It had a disused mine wheel at the top of a bank and an abandoned hut in the centre. Wildlife proliferates here, and if you are looking for a romantic solution to a no-maintenance garden, then this is the one for you.

When I cast my eye over the garden that Pat McCann designed for Marie Curie Cancer Care (RGB3), there were, lurking among the plants tolerant of salty winds, hidden messages that overexposure to the sun's rays can be harmful. I chose to ignore nanny. After all, Chelsea is theatre and I was wafted to distant shores with water lapping at a beach, with delightful attention paid to detail, and with a sweet cottage surrounded by tamarisk, Griselinia, pine and colourful bedding. There were some great ideas here.

Rock follies
If your heart is set upon a rockery complete with cascade follow the example of the "Cumbria in Bloom" garden (RGB4) created by Peter Tinsley & Sons. It illustrates that rockeries only work if you spend thousand of pounds on huge stones laid to look like natural strata, with water crashing down a multi-coursed cascade, propelled by a heavy-duty pump. So often, amateur attempts end up by looking like a heap of stones. The planting, with large and colourful drifts of plants such as rhodohypoxis and garden pinks, can only be copied too.

Perfectly clipped hedging is not necessarily de rigueur, as exemplified by Dutch designer Piet Oudolf and the British garden designer Arne Maynard at the Gardens Illustrated-sponsored garden Evolution (MA26). Deliciously undulating box hedging flanks this rectangular garden where two long, thin beds have been planted with pink and purple perennials arranged in woven threads. This is an interesting idea for annual bedding as well, especially if you choose to indulge in artistic licence by adding lighter 'threads' in white or cream.

Arabella Lennox-Boyd's "A Garden For All Time" (MA22), is a mixture of the old and new. It was certainly a masterpiece of construction, with zigzag water around the edge containing square, stainless steel-edged planters complete with large olive trees. You could take home with you the idea that colour co-ordination isn't everything, as illustrated by her lush and colourful planting towards the front.

Great parterre
"A Garden in Homage to Le Notre" (MA24) contains a delightful, very busy box parterre on two levels interrupted by gentle jets of water, and other ideas worthy to be taken from his copybook including a tall allée, or walkway of clipped bay. For those with a more modernist bent the blue glass and helxine chequer board pattern in Bart's City Life Saver's garden "Chaos and Rhythm" (MON11) may easily appeal.

This year there were many more gardens to be seen, with a selection of courtyard gardens dotting the site. There were two that caught my eye. The first was a delightful 4.5m2 garden by Brinsbury College in West Sussex (NR18), that featured plenty of sculptural palm-like evergreens. Terracotta was used widely as coping, paving and of course as pots, and a delightful mosaic pond lit-up a corner. To its right, "The Essence of Life", by West Oxfordshire College (NR19), was a very colourful affair with a white and blue glass mixed floor controlled by wavey lines of small pebbles set into concrete. The walls were awash with a rich collection of flora and objets d'art representing life on the sea floor.

There was much more to see that would have delighted and inspired you to try out ideas in your garden. Come to the show and you return home enriched by the experience.