"You garden writers," people say to me, "I bet you don't have a garden at all. I bet you live in a flat." The very thought of it — I'd go barmy. And it's rather the same for garden designers. People say to them, "I bet your own garden's a mess, isn't it? I bet it's awful." The fact is that

designers' gardens have to do a job, fulfil a social need like everyone else's, and every one is different. Take, for example, the gardens of three of this year's most talented Chelsea designers: Andy Sturgeon, Sarah Eberle and Jinny Blom.

Andy Stugeon

Sturgeon is the Michael Caine of gardening, very southern, laddishly handsome, a few pounds heavier than in the Nineties when he was the media's new kid on the block, but still with the same crinkly eyes that disappear when he smiles. He and his psychotherapist partner Sarah have three young boys.

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Theirs is one of the biggest back gardens in Brighton: 16ft by 130ft. A wooden walkway snakes out from the house under a tunnel of drunken tree ferns, then opens up to a sitting area. The walkway continues to weave by, just a few inches above the paving — "That's my ha-ha, it keeps the kids moving past." Here we sit and have a sandwich. Further on is a run of narrow borders and trees, then the garden descends into serious child's play with a sandpit, slide and assault course. By the walkway winds a narrow stainless-steel rill, a conspicuously designer touch, but it turns out it's there for the boys to sail their boats in. It's all very practical and manageable.

At the very far end is the "sick bay", a rough, neglected patch where bindweed writhes through the shrubs, left over after shows, which Sturgeon could not bear to dump. Is he sentimental about plants, then? "No, not really. Well, a bit. See that Albizia? There's a placenta under it. And another down there."

He's faintly embarrassed about his garden not being smarter ("We had chickens here, till the foxes got them") and tells me I'm visiting three years too late. "It's for the boys now. See that tulip? There were seven last week." Neighbours expect his garden to be crisp, expensive and modern like a Chelsea garden. "That's a curse. I make clean, contemporary gardens for a living and amazingly it's a niche market, because most rich people want traditional, but at home I want to just do gardening. I used to be a landscaper, I miss the hands-on. I'd love to work a four-day week and thenpotter." So hire a gardener, I suggest. "That's not the point," he replies.

Sarah Eberle

Tough, neat, a mother of three girls, Eberle gardens in a Hampshire village, all thatch, BMWs and wisteria; she calls it "urban". At heart, she's still a Dartmoor girl, breeds dressage ponies, and her greatest love, even above gardens, is wild landscape.

Odd, then, that her show gardens are tough, brutal even, with lots of poured concrete; her garden at Chelsea last year used 16 cubic metres of it. Perhaps it's because she trained as a landscape architect and worked on civic projects before moving into garden design. Yet her gardens are extraordinarily beautiful, classical in their way. "A garden has to be beautiful," she insists. She has no time for glib "installations". And, for clients, she works in any number of different styles.

In the end it's spaces in a garden that matter to her: "If you can't make the spaces, then whatever decoration you put on top won't work. I really dislike applied patterns in a garden [think fancy fences and overcomplicated paving], things have to be genuine."

Despite such ruthlessness in her professional work, her own half-acre plot at home is traditional. For clients, it seems, she knows exactly what she wants to do, but at home she's uncertain, and the informal, impermanent, rather naturalistic planting lets her experiment and try new plants; vines romp into old apples and golden hops and clematis smother rustic arches. This year, with the children all but grown, she is about to take out more of the lawn and replace it with gravel gardening — an echo, perhaps, of her Chelsea garden, which will be carpeted with hard volcanic sands and planted with barrel cactuses and carob trees. At the front of the house, Sarah's garden is more romantic still, all apple blossom and peaceful, lime-green woodland plants.

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