This year 'The Shaikh', as he is familiarly known, has taken as his theme the fact that climate change has a positive element - we can all use our gardens more at night. Coupling his Chelsea Garden of the Night (design sketch at left), which shows how a garden can be designed with after-work and evening use in mind, with a conference on climate change The Shaikh makes us all think a little more broadly about this crucial subject.

The Garden for all Time for the Evening Standard by Arabella Lennox-Boyd, who won the award for the best garden at the Show in 1998, also makes a deeper point. Integrating powerful symbols of Christianity like olive trees and water, she has a created a garden which looks back as well as forward, a serene space where almost wild perennial borders are bounded by cool and peaceful lawns… mirroring our own lives.

There's quite a blend of traditional and modern at this year's Show. Mondrian colours and patterns illuminate the Cercle et Carré garden from Colin Elliott for the Design and Landscape Centre; Paul Cooper, brings us both aerial and floating planters in another of his audacious conceptions; Arne Maynard and Piet Oudolf bring us perennials planted in the 21st Century style in Evolution for Gardens Illustrated.

Looking back, the Homage to le Notre garden for the Garden History Society reflects on a small scale the broad landscapes of the gardener to Louis XIV who died 300 years ago.

In between, in what you might call the modern tradition, Geoff Whiten, without whom no Chelsea would ever be quite the same, has designed his most appealing garden for some years, a Waterside retreat that both looks back to the past and forward blending the traditional and the modern in both design and materials. And another Chelsea stalwart, Alan Sargent, has used contemporary recreations of traditional materials in a symmetrical silver garden for year-round interest.

David Stevens is always interesting and often very impressive; he's won two Best Gardens awards amongst his eleven Gold Medals and he's back with a garden for B&Q which blends his trademark modern design with tough traditional planting - not to mention those wonderful blue glass pebbles.

This year there are few of the theatrical histrionics of the past… no vast mountains of slate or towers of timber. It's as if, in this millennial year, all the designers have thought long and hard and created gardens with more substance, more feeling, more insight and less unfocused excess. There's playfulness, I'm glad to say, but little pointless melodrama. And the show is all the better for that.