At this year's Chelsea Flower Show, which finished last weekend, traditionally-minded visitors raised their eyebrows at the creation that won the Best Show Garden award, writes Jane Powers.
Sarah Eberle's 600 Days with Bradstone was a tour de force that was both brave and otherworldly (or perhaps brutal and nightmarish, if you were one of the straw- boater-and-Laura-Ashley brigade).
The theatrical space was heavy with terracotta-coloured concrete and rocks, and spiky with cacti and other succulents. Gargantuan bowls of brash marigolds proffered some of the few instances of flower.
The garden was supposed to depict an allotment that an astronaut might tend while on a 600-day tour of duty inside a biosphere on Mars.
The plants all had medicinal, nutritional or other uses, and the concrete, apparently, was made from materials very like those to be found on the red planet.
Given that one of the much-talked-of themes at this year's show was sustainability, it was a little ironic that the top prize went to a garden of concrete, a non-renewable resource that emits vast quantities of carbon dioxide in the making. But never mind that: Chelsea is all about illusion, not reality, and Eberle's was one of the more interesting fantasies in recent years, especially when the sun came out, burnishing the warm tones in the concrete and setting the brassy marigolds alight.
There were plenty of other displays to illustrate their designers' commitment to planet earth. Marshalls Sustainability Garden, by Scenic Blue, showed how a domestic garden could embody environmentally-friendly ideas, with walls made of recycled scaffolding boards, a green-roofed building, a reed bed for purifying grey water, wild flowers, vegetables, compost and sculptural glass pyramids containing photovoltaic panels for generating electricity from the sun.
There was more photovoltaic action in Urban Oasis, designed by Laurie Chetwood and Patrick Collins. The centrepiece was a spectacular 12-metre-tall kinetic sculpture that used the sun's energy to open and close like a giant spiny flower. The petals generated electricity, which pumped water through channels in the garden.
One of the prettiest gardens also had a green theme: the Fetzer Sustainable Winery Garden, designed by Kate Frey, made much use of recycled materials, and featured a windmill and a mini-wetland of aquatic plants for filtering and cleaning waste water. Native Californian and European wild flowers were planted in the dry soil under the vines, proving that even in drought conditions (another of the show's hot topics) a garden can be effervescent and colourful - and busy with bees all week.
Bees, insects and biodiversity were on the agenda in many gardens, with plantings and habitats designed to suit wildlife. The Fortnum & Mason Garden, designed by Robert Myers, had four stately beehives, a metre and half tall. They were empty, as the show organisers wisely decided it would be a little risky to let colonies of bees mosey around the show's 157,000 human visitors. Nonetheless, there were plenty of freelance buzzers in the drifts of herbaceous plants. The hives are to be relocated to the roof of the shop in Piccadilly, where they will be filled with bees for honey production.
This year, more than ever, the gardens were full of bright and vibrant blooms: red, yellow, orange, clear blue and even lime green. Purple, for the third year in a row, was the undisputed king of colours: with big drumstick alliums, sculpted or floppy irises, and spires of the blue-black Salvia 'Mainacht'. Dense hedges or blocks of yew and hornbeam were used as enclosures or backdrops in some of the spaces.
Grasses, either light catching, such as Stipa gigantea, or wispy, such as S tenuissima, were once again mingled in many of the show gardens, often with herbaceous plants, forming what has become Chelsea's signature (and appealing) floral froth.
Diarmuid Gavin presented his fifth show garden here since 1995. The Westland Garden, designed with Stephen Reilly, won a silver-gilt medal. It was planned around a double studio for a creative couple: a sinuous and airy, cruciform building, fabricated by Irish company Shomera. The handsome planting - shaggy in bits and controlled in others - was accented by repeating motifs of clipped box domes, swishy pheasant tail grass and the silvery swords of Astelia.
Paula Ryan, the Italy-based designer of the Amnesty International Garden for Human Rights (which gained a silver medal) was born and raised in Ireland. Her creation, which is to be rehomed on the roof of Amnesty's London HQ, was a strong-lined and clean structure with lots of drought-proof planting.
Another designer, Sue Goss, whose Transit of Venus won a bronze medal in the chic garden category, is a recent arrival in Ireland: she now lives in west Cork.