I forgot to mention my thoughts on Chelsea Flower Show last week – as a couple of readers pointed out.

So – whilst I really enjoyed watching it all on the telly this year, I wasn’t overly impressed with a lot of it. I recall a friend saying, “I get impressed by a lot less as I get older” and I think that applies to this year’s flagship RHS show. Whilst I absolutely adored Sarah Erbele’s garden, with the chainsaw-carved Mother Earth section of Redwood and the dry stone wall created by ‘my mates from Yorkshire’, the rest of the gardens at the show all felt very ‘samey’.

Every year the gardens on Main Avenue seem to consist of a large area of some-sort-of-paving and gravel, an obligatory path leading to a weird structure, predictable planting schemes and of course a water feature, which all too often is a bl**dy rill. I hate rills. They must be one of the most impractical addition to any garden and would get clogged up with leaves and general ‘garden debris’ before you could even say ‘I don’t want a rill’. The elevated rill in Arit Andersons ‘Parkinsons UK’ garden, which won The People’s Choice Award, was a novel and thought-provoking idea - but just as impractical. And they are just death traps for bees and other pollinators who simply get washed ‘down the plug hole’ in them, as they try to drink.

Most water features turn into a nightmare, to be honest. Whilst a well designed, well built and well maintained water feature can be a thing of real beauty in a garden, most people underestimating the amount of skill, and money, needed to create and maintain them. Garden ponds are great for wildlife but often end up just becoming a green swamp; so if you have been influenced by Chelsea and want a water feature in your own garden, do please do the research first – and don’t bother with a rill.

Whilst the iconic RHS Chelsea Flower Show dates remained unchanged this year, some other RHS shows are changing, and are worth making a note of. The RHS will debut a new Flower Show at the Badminton Estate in Gloucestershire, from the 8-12 July. And they have also been invited to hold a ‘special’ show at Sandringham from 22-26 July.

I wonder why they have forgotten about Cardiff. It used to be the opening show for the RHS calendar and I created many a show garden for it – including the first RHS Show Garden that you could interact with, The Really Fit Garden, which had outdoor fitness equipment incorporated within the garden design. It was great fun and we were surprised to realise that the biggest demographic using the equipment on the garden were teenage boys, apparently the most difficult group to ‘get into a garden’! I also won Silver and Best in Show RHS medals with the Gold eluding me – maybe I should have incorporated a rill.

And although it only reached second place in the ‘New Plant of the Year Awards’ at Chelsea, the plant that I will certainly be introducing into my own garden (and others) is the Hydrangea paniculata GROUNDBREAKER® RUBY.

Not only is it a ‘groundcover’ plant, its flowers open as white, and gradually deepen through shades of pink to a rich ruby red, creating a lost of varying colour from early summer into late autumn. This means the hydrangea brings both seasonal colour and structural in a completely new format that is ideal for landscaping, covering ground, edging borders and growing in containers. And that makes it a winner in my eyes.