Click here for the Back Garden of the Year Competition entry form

What is it that makes your garden: a peace of your own making, a chance to open your eyes to the natural world, to write a three-dimensional autobiography or to grab a little soil therapy? It’s not often you get paid for the privilege, unless you happen to win The Times/Fetzer Vineyards Back Garden of the Year Competition. Try your hand between now and June 2 and you might find yourself looking for someone to water the pots while you jet off to California on a trip for two, having won first prize. The holiday includes a guided tour of the Fetzer Vineyards, where the planting of cover crops to attract beneficial insects is just one of the sustainable practices that make this winery so outstanding.

There are four categories to enter and each one takes a prize. Best Country Garden caters for people who have made something in the rural style and spirit; something, however small, that relates to the living environment. The chances are it will be cottagey or naturalistic, maybe with a touch of topiary and probably in the country – though some suburban gardens can feel distinctly rural, so feel free to enter them too. Then there’s the Urban Garden category, the place to enter more sophisticated, inward-looking gardens, which use more modern materials and paving; gardens to see more than to do. They might be tiny or even just roof gardens. Myself, I would love to see some really first-class patios where the whole garden is in pots; they are so rare. Again, there will be the Green Space category, somewhere to show off a garden – or just part of a garden – which is both attractive and sustainable. We are not after a “green gadget” garden, but something that plays its part simply and effectively for the environment and its owners. As in so many aspects of life, less can be more.

This year there’s a new category, Best Family Garden. In recent years there have been some excellent entries that were clearly designed for children as much as for adults, and we wanted to recognise and explore that. I remember requisitioning my last garden from the children when the youngest reached 13 and no one seemed inclined to play badminton more than twice a year any more. That great, green prairie was mine at last to garden more ambitiously. But if I ask them now what they liked, it’s not the badminton space they get excited about, it’s the peripheral tunnel through the bamboos and round the back of the shed: “The jungley bit”. The space, in fact, where adults and children both get dramatically close to nature. This is what we want to see in the competition: environments that are fun to be in, places that provoke the imagination and the senses.

Last year’s overall winner across all categories was Sorrell Grove of Ipswich. She was a reluctant entrant, who surprised herself by having a go. Not everybody wants their garden to be in the public eye, even locally, and only a few friends knew about her wonderful creation. “It’s my sanctuary,” she says, “my therapy.” But the judges loved it and so has everybody else.

Never did I see such a sequence of happy atmospheres within one small garden, and none of them sequestered into boxy, hedge-bound garden rooms. There was an Italianate green garden of ecclesiastically simple turf, dwarf box hedges and one spherical thorn tree. There was a garden of architectural foliage – Chusan palms, phormium, plume poppy – but again it was restful, it did not fall into the predictable cliché of clamorous cannas and dangerous dahlias.

Best of all, there was a meadow garden, and whereas the word meadow conjures up visions of misty, orchid-riddled acres, Sorrell’s meadow was no bigger than the room in which I write. Yet it managed to capture that meadowy thing in miniature, that softness, that sense of walking between waving masses of grass, that sense of sanctuary. It was a very beautiful contrivance, not a wild garden at all. But as Sorrell says: “My garden is totally contrived and I’m happy with that.”

That’s what makes a good garden: people doing precisely what they want to do and doing it really well, with as much thought and attention to detail as they can possibly muster. It doesn’t matter whether the style is sharp and precise or laid-back and dreamy; it’s making an atmosphere that counts, creating something that makes you stop in your tracks and smile. That’s the magic, and so many gardens have it.

If you would like to see how your garden compares, read the instructions below. Send us a few snaps that sum up the garden (the open spaces and buildings as well as the flowers) and the simplest of sketch plans (the backs of fag packets are almost acceptable). Who knows, maybe I’ll be knocking on your door.

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