“Stop trying too hard; glam and glitz aren’t everything.” This was the lesson to gardeners from the RHS Chelsea Flower Show this year. The recession may have taken away a number of rich garden sponsors and gardens, but they weren’t missed; it was just an easier-going show. Ulf Nordfjell’s flower garden, still a big-budget affair and covered in glass and granite, took best in show, but for a fraction of the price Tom Hoblyn’s woodland pool of carnivorous plants intrigued everybody who saw it and has been sold to a private client. For all its discreet polish, Luciano Giubbilei’s formal Italian garden came second with a gold medal.

Silver gilt and Most Creative Garden prize went to the Fenchurch Garden, a modest affair using green walls and muscly, root-like, moulded concrete to form the structure.

Last year’s best in show also did imaginative things with concrete. This is something that we should be trying to do at home: less off-the-peg, more have-a-go. The University of Cumbria’s “potter’s garden”, pretty but not kitsch, knocked spots off all the other small gardens. And if almost every show garden had green credentials, most employed them with little fuss; they were pointed out, but not the point, of the garden.

In the Great Pavilion fewer nursery stands meant more spacious aisles, which was fabulous and just as it should be. Finally nailed: those dreadful, shuffling queues of the 1980s. The stands were as exciting as ever, people thronging to see Beales’s and Austin’s roses and Downderry’s lavender collection; a nice lesson there for making a hummocky group of different-sized and coloured lavenders instead of the usual single-variety hedge.

Everyone wanted to have the double white Trillium ‘Snowbunting’ brought by Hartside Nursery from the cool North Pennine uplands, and the Brazilian florist Zita Elze’s stand — part cool woodland garden, part exquisite pale flower arrangement — was adored. The race for hot-coloured exotics is off.

In tough times the manufacturers of chunky garden machinery were doing a brisk trade, perhaps on the back of reduced foreign holidays, and during his royal progress the Duke of Edinburgh snapped up a pair of battery-operated Bosch secateurs (cash from his private secretary’s pocket) and gave them at once to the Prince of Wales to spare his bad shoulder.

Garden machinery means more gardening and that’s good, surely, but oh, the accompanying tat! Stalls creeping in to fill the space of craft-fair bits and bobs (I don’t suppose the Duke leapt at a lavender cushion) when — and I have banged on to the RHS about it — there should be more places to sit down and less overpriced catering that angers visitors and exhibitors alike, all captive for the day. And the dreadful sculpture! Taste doesn’t come into it. So much of it was just expensive, pretentious and silly.

Gardeners should relax and abandon this kind of glitz, too, for DIY sculpture of any kind. At least it would be fun to make. Even the much-hyped all-Plasticine garden from James May was an opportunity thrown away, a bit of a laugh but ultimately boring. And as un-green as you can get.

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