The Australian Garden. Dreamtime Down Under.... If a couple of Aborigines had walked in and crouched down by the water, or a dingo lay curled up in the shade, the astmosphere would have been complete. My husband thought that this was one of the best gardens at the show. He could imagine sitting back in the corrugated tin hut at the back of the garden and drinking a cold 'tinny'.

The Canal Boat. Take a slow boat to happiness - well I wouldn't mind having a long holiday in this beautiful canal boat.

The 'Patients' Garden - This was designed to help a patient who was recovering in a convalescent home, it was supposed to stimulate the mind.

The Citroen Garden. Citroen in bloom - a very noisy, colourful and vibrant garden. Totally OTT but some of the water features were well worth a second look.

The Feng Shui Garden. This picture doesn't do justice to the garden, you really needed a 360 degree lens to show the rainbow effect that the designer had created.

The Woodland Tranquillity Garden - This would be part of my dream garden, a nice place to sit and let the world go rushing past.

Enter The Secret World of the Flower Fairies - another favourite. There were a lot of show gardens at Hampton using circles in one medium or other. Very effective they were too.

As you walk through the Timeline Garden you are presented with miniature gardens from different parts of the world, but all on the Grenwich meridian. The gardens, and their uses, vary from a Sussex flower garden and an allotment in the UK, one brimming with beautiful flowers and the other with luscious vegetables, through a Moorish courtyard and a French potager, all very pleasing to a gardener, until finally you reach Africa. Represented in Africa are a market garden of Mali and gardens by the River Niger where the use of the garden is a necessity of life, not a pleasure. At the far end is Burkina Faso where growing vegetables means survival, here they use "magic stones" to help conserve water and to stop the soil from being eroded. And we complain about hosepipe bans!

Here are some photographs of a few of the stalls and displays inside the numerous pavilions.

Hampton Court Palace as we were leaving, footsore, loaded with ideas, and only a few plants. Two buddleja and two dianthus from the plant heritage marquee, a verbascum, a crocosmia, a black grass - Ophiopogon planiscapus nigrescens, a miniature clematis, a campanula (its only a little one - 4 in. high) and a lot of leaflets. We had to walk through the rose garden and past the herbaceaous borders to get back to the car park. It was hard work because I wanted to have a closer look but it had been a long day and we still had to get home.