Most gardens at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show take about a year to come to fruition, but Sarah Eberle will have had a mere three-month run-up when it opens on May 19, it She is working flat out on a trio of “credit-crunch” gardens for the RHS, and the budget – just £15,000 for all three – is as tight as the timing.

“I do like a challenge,” says Eberle, 52, as we walk round the farm near Whit-church, in Hampshire, where she lives with her husband, Robert Stevens, 47.

The walls of her downstairs loo are adorned with RHS medal certificates, including eight golds and best in show at Chelsea in 2007.

This year, Eberle, one of Britain’s leading landscape gardeners, had been poised to create a show garden for Marks & Spencer, but they pulled out at Christmas. “I would have thought less of them if they hadn’t,” says Eberle, who hopes to team up with the company again next year – provided the economy has perked up by then. When you are closing stores and laying off staff, it is probably not the best idea to be seen spending in the region of £250,000 (the average cost of a show garden, though there are rumours that one ran to £800,000 last year) on something that lasts as long as a bunch of cut roses.

Eberle isn’t the only designer to have lost a sponsor. Chelsea favourites such as Christopher Bradley-Hole (Spink Property), Cleve West (Neal’s Yard Remedies) and Geoffrey Whiten (Brett Landscaping) have also fallen by the wayside. In February, another show stalwart came a cropper. Fleming’s, an Australian nursery that had occupied a high-profile spot since 2004, cancelled; one of its nurseries was affected by the recent bushfires in Victoria. This has left the RHS with only 13 show gardens, as opposed to 22 last year.

Rather than leave the site empty, the RHS decided to take the unusual step of commissioning something to fill the space. During a brainstorming session, in which gardens based on current concerns such as sustainability or wild-life were discussed – and rejected – it was the credit crunch that won the day.

The theme was intended to be a little tongue-in-cheek and upbeat, but with an underlying serious purpose.

“When times are tough, people are getting involved in their gardens and spending more time at home,” says Alex Baulkwill, shows manager for the RHS. “We wanted to inspire them.”

In early March, the RHS contacted Eberle. “Sarah is so imaginative and quirky,” Baulkwill says. “If anyone was going to be able to do it, it would be her.” Her 2007 Chelsea winner was certainly both: 600 Days with Bradstone imagined the garden an astronaut might create while on a 600-day tour of Mars, with plants grown for food and medicine against a striking backdrop of concrete and sand walls, representing the geology of the planet.

The setting for Eberle’s 2009 contribution is rather more earthbound and prosaic: a street scene borrowed from the RHS props department, it has three front doors painted on it, representing neighbours in a neat terrace. The RHS came up with a list of about 20 credit-crunch-related titles for each of their gardens. Eberle chose the overdrawn artist’s garden, the banker’s garden and the offshore garden. She toyed with other ideas, such as the repossessed garden, before rejecting them as a little too close to the bone.

In this fantasy street of unlikely neighbours, Eberle sees the artist as female and in her fifties, “rather poor, growing fruit, vegetables and herbs”. No doubt she would also have a cat and a few cannabis plants, but neither is allowed at the Chelsea showground. The planting won’t be finalised until the last minute, when all three gardens are built, but it will probably include colourful nasturtiums, grasses, irises and euphorbias – all picking up on the rusty theme of the steel grids that will act as a path. An old sewing-machine base, which was covered in blackboard paint at a cost of £10, will act as a table, and at the front gate will be a basket of fruit for sale to passers-by – every penny counts for the impecunious artist, whose “work” will be on display in the garden, including wall panels made from recycled industrial materials.

In her mind, Eberle’s banker is definitely a man, and the garden represents his town bolt hole, “unless he is really down on his luck”, while his wife and children will be in their comfortable Cotswolds pile. Based on “a well-known board game”, it bears a resemblance to Monopoly, with a table and chair carved from wood in the form of a giant die and shaker. “Dare I say it, but it is the least me,” she says. “I am asymmetric in my style, landscape-based and not into structured beds.”

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