HOWZAT

It's not an easy place to garden — and in any case, her own work ethic makes her feel that gardening is actually skiving from "real" work. To relax truly, she goes to the horses or to wild landscapes to see the light on the hills. Remembering childhood car journeys, Eberle's daughters still tease her with her constant refrain, "Oh girls, look at the light." It ought to be her epitaph.

Jinny Blom

Jinny Blom lives down the Old Kent Road, in Nunhead. From the front door of her 19th-century semi you can spot City towers and the Gherkin; out the back, there are trees as far as you can see (somewhere under the leafy jungle is a railway cutting). The foreground — her garden — is simple and geometric; a wooden terrace leads between formal pools and generous beds to more seating and a wibbly-wobbly, clipped boundary hedge. Geometric or not, the planting is very easy-going, and that softness over strong bones - walls, hedges, mounds — is her trademark as a designer.

Blom the person is a compelling mixture of energy and sensitivity and down-to-earthness. She comes from a family of artists and musicians, hankers to be a classical singer, travels the world and knows everybody. Restaurateur then psychotherapist, she turned to gardens after nursing a terminally ill friend and realising there was more to life. She has no training for gardens, but just got on with it, at first in the design office of Dan Pearson. Like her gardens, she's all enthusiasm over solid bones.

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Nunhead was bombed to bits in the war and she is very clear that she would not feel comfortable making "a ponced-up garden" here. So her fences are of standard feather-edged boards, and her terrace made of recycled timbers that had once held back the riverbank at Deptford. What about those trendy box cubes on the corners of the beds then? "Oh God," she says, "they were left over from a show garden. Are they too much?"

The fact is, it's a very crisp garden not unlike a stage set, with receding wings of box, and Blom is its leading lady, sure to amuse: "That leaning Judas tree we call 'Clinton' because of the distinguishing bend in its trunk." Or "the soil is miserable, made-up London stuff, all brick dust and cat shit." And "that's my Fred West border, where all the pets are buried."

In particular, gardens are spiritual places for Blom, and the raised travertine walkways of her Chelsea garden this year will symbolise the journey of life. Is garden-making an art, then? "Absolutely. The Persians said gardens and music and poetry are the greatest of the arts. Gardens are spiritual, they need vision, and they only come about through co-operation of all kinds."

RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2007

Andy Sturgeon: Cancer Research UK Garden, site number MA20

Sarah Eberle: 600 Days with Bradstone, site number MA22

Jinny Blom: Laurent-Perrier Garden, site number MA17

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