Silver Gilt Medal to Tom Smith Plants
The spectacular, huge gardens and colourful blooms are what most focus on at The Chelsea Flower Show every year, but my eye is caught - season after season - by the lush and often whimsical presentation of everyday vegetables and herbs.
Tom Smith Plants was awarded a Silver Gilt Medal for its simple groupings of single plants - turnips, say, or beans - in baskets or boxes, like bunches of flowers, or clambering lushly up slender strips of trellis, while herbs cluster in little earthenware pots like flowering plants.
Most playful were the designs for allotments, dedicated vegetable gardens recycling metal barrels, bathtubs and pots as containers, or with joyously colourful sheds.
While Jim Lawrence, in its barn conversion display stand, used simple square boxes of herbs if they were flowers - mixing textures and colours - in a minimalist, contemporary style.
