Not everyone can be a winner, but here are three great runners-up. Next week, we will reveal two category winners and after that you will see The Times/Banrock Station Wines Back Garden of 2006. If it turns out to be you, start packing for that trip to Australia.

Best Established Garden

I have come to the conclusion that exotic gardening is a man thing, done by blokes who want to boast about the size of their bananas. Tim Wilmot has indeed got a perfectly respectable Musa basjoo, but it’s his palms he’s really proud of. And justifiably so.

Tim has been gardening at Yate near Bristol for 18 years. “The garden is mine,” he clarifies. “My wife does the furniture.” The exotic look arrived nine years ago, when Tim requisitioned the quarter-acre garden from its child-friendly stage. Out went the leylandii, in came bamboos and horse manure. Decaying apple trees were cleared, and the lawn shrank to make space for monster foliage. “I still like grass,” says Tim. “It’s a kinder contrast to palms than bark or gravel. But I don’t miss clematis and roses.” Tim and his wife have a software company and he likes precision; he enjoys the tidying up that goes with exotic gardening.

This particular exotic garden is not a wet jungle garden, but a drier environment where hard foliage abounds. It contains most of the palms one might attempt to grow in the milder parts of the UK. There is a fat-trunked Jubaea chilensis, and the grey feather palm Butia capitata, which flowers, and has been growing outside with winter protection for ten years. There is the blue-leaved form of the European fan palm Chamaerops humilis var. argentea from Morocco, and spiny Trithrinax acanthocoma. If the temperature drops below -4C, Tim puts a fleece over it. And seven Trachycarpus, which Tim says are easy to grow. He admits he’s a weather-watcher in winter: “I would love an Eden Project dome to come over the garden at the press of a button.” Some plants do go under glass.

A collection of architectural exotics do not make a good garden – the trick is incorporate them in a good design. Tim has broken up the space well, into glades and short paths through the foliage.

The garden has its softer moments, too. There is a koi pond and tubs of Hedychium gardnerianum to scent the air in September. “Not that I’m into flowers,” Tim says, “but that one’s acceptable.”

Best New Garden

What a recipe for success is sandy soil and a high water table. You can see the proof at David and Elaine Rolfe’s garden near Abergavenny, which was started four years ago and looks as if it has been there 20.

The Rolfes work from home in web design and building computers, and have eight children between the ages of 7 and 19. They are also foster parents; sometimes there are as many as 11 children in the house. ‘‘We wanted a house for eight,” says David. “This was for rent – it’s an old mill – so here we are. But there were no plans for a garden.”

But Elaine started to devour gardening magazines and to visit local gardens. She wanted something other than the rhododendrons favoured by the neighbours. “I imagined something softer and richer, like Abbey Dore in Herefordshire, with winding paths and flowers.” Within months, she was planting a half-acre garden, then a sheep field containing one lilac and two roses. David built the structures – gazebos, arches, seats and a chinchilla cage.

“There are hardly any full-price plants,” says Elaine. “I go for the bargains. Sometimes I buy plants without labels. I feel sorry for them, like orphans. I also got loads of plants from my mother’s garden.”

Explore Gardens

• Hampton Court Palace Flower Show

• Chelsea Flower Show

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