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Medals awarded A walk on the wild side

A taste of the good life Kids’ stuff

Floral marquees Rose of the Year

The colours are rich, deep and sultry in the Floral Marquees, at the heart of the show, where over 80 nurseries and growers are staging a plant lover’s paradise.

The most exotic display has to be that of first-timers Desert to Jungle, with their extraordinary range of massive jungle plants. A huge purple-ribbed banana, Ensete ventricosum maurelii, jostles for space with the giant handspan of a single leaf of Tetrapanax papyrifer.

Nursery owner Dave Root says their worst problem was transporting the massive plants the 150 miles from Somerset. “Some of these big leaves are three feet square, and they damage so easily,” he says. “The bigger they get the more problematic they get - but if we can get them here in one piece, the more fabulous they look.”

Avon Bulbs is embracing the deep purple look, too, with some gorgeous selections including a magnificent brooding Eucomis 'Sparkling Burgundy', and Cosmos 'Chocamola', a shorter, more free-flowering chocolate cosmos. Dahlias this year are far more relaxed and free-form in shape: the flowers of near-black 'Dark Desire', also from Avon, seem to float on long wiry stems, as do the flowers of Dahlia 'Ragged Robin', a vibrant red dahlia from Harveys Garden Plants.

Elsewhere in the marquees, look out for the Big Plant Nursery, which does what it says on the tin: their lotus banana, Musella lasiocarpa, is in full, extraordinary flower. Hopleys has made an amusing mini-swimming pool garden, complete with tiny diving board, and there are plenty of strange and wonderful plants on sale, like the ultra-spiky daisy-flowered Burkheya purpurea from Burncoose Nurseries.

For the first time in the 25-year history of the competition, a single-flowered rose, Rosa 'Sweet Haze', has won the Rose of the Year for 2008. It’s being hailed as a new era for the rose-breeding world, and a move towards more wildlife-friendly, species-type roses, which pollinating insects such as bees and hoverflies find far more attractive.

“I personally like species roses,” says Bernhard Mehring of German breeders Rosen Tantau. “Commercially speaking, species roses are not necessarily something you’d look for, but we hope that this will make things change, and people will consider single roses now.”

Wildlife TV presenter and gardener Chris Baines agrees. “It’s wonderful to have a rose winning the Rose of the Year that is single,” he says. “Until now roses have been big, blowsy, double flowers which don’t have much pollen, but this rose acts as a magnet for bees.”

The rose is a natural-looking shrub type with pale pink flowers similar to dog roses. It grows to only about 70cm (28in) in height, and does well in containers. Its flowers are borne in large clusters over a long period and have a sweet, pure scent which is a magnet for wildlife.