A team of first time Chelsea designers walked off with the award for Best Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show today. The Anglo-Dutch team of British garden designer Arne Maynard and Dutch plantsman and designer Piet Oudolf pipped six other Gold Medal winners to the coveted award with their "Evolution" tapestry of perennials enclosed in a billowing box hedge for Gardens Illustrated magazine.

Other Gold Medal winners were the Evening Standard, with Arabella Lennox-Boyd's "Garden for all Time" featuring six ancient olive trees and timeless water sculpture, Leyhill Prison with their wild flower garden entitled 'Time' The Healer', the Alpine Garden Society for its picturesque piece of the Austrian Tirol with huge rocks and thousands of alpine plants, Cabbages and Kings with the Chateau de Bosmelet for its Anglo-French garden of decorative vegetables, RF Hotels for a determinedly modernistic "Living Sculpture Garden" and the Garden History Society for its parterre in the French style with the focal point of a slanted mirror.

The Gold Medals seemed to come in pairs this year for the different types of exhibits. Two rose nurseries won Golds, David Austin Roses, who introduced six new varieties of their 'new' old-fashioned roses and Mattocks Roses featuring a wide range of their County Series of ground cover varieties. Two exhibits in the cottage garden style again did well. Glebe Cottage Plants, showing hardy perennials old and new, and Hardys Cottage Garden Plants with their four exquisite borders surrounding wooden chess board both won Golds.

Both sweet pea exhibits from Diane Sewell and Dave Matthewman won Golds and two hosta exhibits from Goldbrook Plants and Park Green Nurseries won Golds; the two small bulb specialists, Avon Bulbs and Broadleigh Gardens, two herb exhibits from Jekka's Herb Farm and Cheshire Herbs, and the two nurseries specialising in carnivorous plants, Hampshire Carnivorous Plants and South West Carnivorous Plants, also won Golds.

Seven specialist societies won Gold Medals. The British Mycological Society's exhibit explaining the difference between edible and poisonous fungi, the bonsai exhibit from the Federation of British Bonsai Societies and the National Chrysanthemum Society all won Golds. The Hardy Plant Society showed plants from the reigns of the two Queen Elizabeths, Orchid Society of Great Britain showed the wide range of orchids which can be grown by amateurs - both Golds.

Two scientific stands won the top accolade. The exhibit from Sparsholt College in Hampshire outlined how mathematics influences nature and the Oxford Botanic Garden explained why plants smell.