A Martian allotment has pipped a hotly tipped Swedish garden to first place at the Chelsea Flower Show.

Royal Horticultural Society judges caused consternation when they plumped for a garden designed to keep an astronaut happy during a stay on Mars.

The winner of the Best in Show award and an RHS gold medal was created after eight years of research into the type of garden that could be grown on the Red Planet.

The garden, officially called '600 Days with Bradstone' but more popularly referred to as 'Life on Mars', has medicinal and nutritional plants, with a handful of flowers to provide colour, but contains a large proportion of packed earth, concrete and stone.

BACKGROUND

• Turf wars at Chelsea show over garden lawns

• Colourful favourites face public vote

BACKGROUND

• Kew experts create garden for hotter summer

• Things are looking up for urban growers

• Gardening advantages in hotter and drier summers

• Home on the web - Chelsea Flower Show

Multimedia

• Picture gallery: Chelsea Flower Show: six of the best

BACKGROUND

• Women ‘have the greener fingers’

• Chelsea Flower Show sustains a theme with some cosmic displays

• Mars attack leaves fans shellshocked

• Flower show judges favour life on Mars

Multimedia

• Picture gallery: Chelsea Show Garden Winners 2007

Related Internet Links

• The lowdown on Chelsea Flower Show

BACKGROUND

• It's a jungle out there

• Monty's world

• Judgment day

• The secret gardens

Chelsea Flower Show 2007 winners

Find out if your favourite garden won a gold at this year's show

BACKGROUND

• Newcomers to the Chelsea Flower Show

• Prestige design apprenticeship unveiled

• Cultivate your own style

• Damp start for Malvern Gardening Festival

Diarmuid Gavin plays it safe at this year's Chelsea Flower Show

Horticultural revolutionary Diarmuid Gavin is nothing if not controversial. But for this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, he seems to be hedging his bets

BACKGROUND

• Iggy, flower child of the Chelsea show

• Royal Horticlutural Show: calendar of events

• Water watch

BACKGROUND

• A path runs through it

• Border lines

The concrete and rock garden, created by Sarah Eberle, was described as "brave" by other show garden designers but it was regarded as an unlikely winner because it lacked in obvious aesthetic appeal.

Bob Sweet, the show's organiser, said that "without a doubt" some of the designers would be spitting tacks at the decision and the failure of others to win a gold medal.

He said there were other contenders for the top award but to have chosen any other show garden would have been have gone for the soft option.

"What they recognised overall was really how brave it was to design a garden for Mars and to pull it off. It captures everyone's imagination," he said.

Ulf Nordfjell, the Swedish designer of the 'A Tribute to Linnaeus', had been the hot favourite to win and appeared shellshocked after learning his garden had been beaten by the Martian landscape.

His garden, representative of spring in Sweden, was built to mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus who devised the Latin name system still used today to identify plants and animals.

A second display devoted to Linnaeus, that of the Linnean Society of London which next week welcomes Emperor Akihito of Japan to give the anniversary speech, won a silver-gilt medal in the lifelong learning category at Chelsea.

Ms Eberle created the Martian garden in conjunction with the European Space Agency and the Science Museum in London which advised her on what could grow on Mars and what astronauts might need.

Times recommends

• Second homes: credit crunch casualty or money-spinner?
• How I built my own sliding house
• Top 10 incentives for house buyers