Quick thoughts: Malvern Spring Show: generally awful, amateur efforts - the gold winners were the notable exceptions, but I'm afraid that none of them would have got anything like a gold at Chelsea (or Hampton Court, come to that). It's all very well for me to criticise, I've never done one - but I will, when an appropriate opportunity comes through. I hope that I've learned some lessons from detailed observation.

Chelsea, however: standard generally excellent, but a bit safe? Dreamy, tranquil, green and white planting is guaranteed to hit the zeitgeist dead on. I'm always interested in the synchronicity between the gardens - not just in the planting, but the hard landscaping was very similar in many cases too: so much stacked stone walls, pale-coloured, matt finish timber, dull oxidised metal, loads of slender Flemish clay brick pavers, curtains of water partially obscuring detail behind, and so on. How does this happen every year? Was there a bloke selling job lots of white foxgloves and salvias? It's really interesting how designers pick up on the same trends so universally.

I preferred the small gardens to most of the show gardens - the front gardens in the urban category were excellent - did exactly what they said on the tin, treated a difficult, exposed space with sensitivity and care to produce practical and beautiful spaces. I liked the buried Chinese temple show garden too - real originality there, garden-as-archaeological-excavation.

Be interested in any other thoughts?