When this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show opens on Tuesday, many of the regular big guns will be missing, either because the credit crunch has scuppered sponsorship or just because they are taking a timely year off. Among the absentees are Tom Stuart-Smith, Andy Sturgeon and Christopher Bradley-Hole.

That’s disappointing for their fans, of course, but a great opportunity for a new generation of designers hitherto working in their shadow to step into the limelight. Here we look at five exciting entries designed by chaps who have never made one of the big show gardens at Chelsea before. Cometh the flower hour, cometh the man — sadly, they are not joined by any women this year.

Thomas Hoblyn, 45: Foreign & Colonial Investment’s Garden

Hoblyn won a gold last year for Tempest in a Teapot, a leafy urban garden inspired by the composer Rossini. Having studied plant communities all over the world, he specialises in gardens that need little care once established. He likes his designs to “sit comfortably within the surrounding environment”. At present, Hoblyn is working on the garden for a Hindu temple to the goddess Kali in West Bengal.

Chelsea plans: The brief for the garden was to show plants that can adapt to a changing climate — much as the sponsors would like to be seen to be able to do in changing economic times. Although Hoblyn’s garden is inspired by the bogs he studied in North Carolina it features not only plants that are found there (grown from seed in this country), but “what I can see outside my office” near Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk, which has a similar climate. Hoblyn is largely using rushes, reeds and nonflowering plants: “It is subtle planting; I am going to have to be thick-skinned during the show when visitors say that it’s just a load of weeds.” The colour scheme includes green and burnt ochre-orange, as well as blue, which “reflects the mood of the nation”.

With his decorative elements, Hoblyn says he has been “eco-friendly”; they include giant pebble-like cushions made from pressed sheep’s wool and walls built in concrete that uses glass, stones from road sweeping and furnace ash. The decking and wave sculpture are made from a giant redwood that fell in a storm.

thomashoblyn.com

Adam Frost, 39: The QVC Garden

Frost won the best urban garden award at last year’s show for A Welcome Sight, a lovely front plot with a fashionable green wall. He began his horticultural career at Barnsdale, in Rutland, in the late 1980s, where he spent eight years designing and building the gardens used by the late Geoff Hamilton, then the presenter of Gardeners’ World.

Frost has several projects on the go at the moment, including a new garden along the banks of the Nile, just outside Cairo, which came about as a result of a chat with an affluent Egyptian visitor to Chelsea last year. “The key is to stand there and talk to people if you want to get work out of it,” Frost says. Shooting the breeze with the public is not really a problem for him. “With all my gardens, they are about people. I’m not really a believer that they are a wonderful art form. If I can envisage people using them, it is a lot easier to work that way.”

Chelsea plans: Frost’s imagined client for this space is a couple whose children have left home for university. “They are rekindling their love for the garden, and for each other.” To this end, it has two stone panels, inscribed with poetry, and a cosy seating area with a raised fire pit. “It is for cooking, sitting, socialising and having the odd glass.” The planting, too, is romantic — roses, foxgloves, grasses and field maples, for instance — but in a contemporary context. As for the future of the plot, the plants are going to Thrive, a gardening charity.

adamfrost.co.uk

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