Gardens of the floating world would have been more apt, after a build-up week that saw mud-caked designers and their teams heroically struggle through high and wild winds and frequent downpours to finish their show gardens on time for the judging.

On the Sunday, the Chelsea grounds on the banks of a steely, wind-whipped River Thames, still looked like a battlefield but amazingly, when Monday came around, after a long cold night spent working with extra hands on deck, there were all the finished gardens, shining and pristine in the weak early-morning sun, their proud makers standing beside them ready to meet the assembled press, an assortment of showbiz and other celebrity types and, later on that sodden afternoon, the queen of England, who professed herself "pleased".

And well she might. One of her personal favourites, the attractively tall and most affable designer Tom StuartSmith, a 46-year-old of great talent, who wears his eminence lightly, won the top award in his category, the Best in Show for a most beautiful, sensitive and deceptively simple-looking garden that seamlessly combined unadorned modernism with old-fashioned romanticism.

Sponsored by The Telegraph newspaper, this is the second time the 46-year-old has scooped the big prize, along with his sixth gold medal.

It was richly deserved and absolutely the right choice, its sumptuous layers and lines of purple, blue, white and rusty brown naturalistic planting of mainly perennials making it a clear and outright winner from the very first, long before it was even finished. StuartSmith got the normally unflappable judges excited, with one actually declaring it "without doubt, the best show garden I have ever seen".

They all thought it displayed "a risque choice of plants, including Viburnum rhytidifolium, which is an unusual plant to use in association with pastel herbaceous plants".

Stuart-Smith used a whole series of this tall (1.8m) and excellent viburnum, which has 'rusty' flowers that fitted perfectly with other 'rusted' elements used, particularly as they were pruned to have many bare, knock-kneed stems that allowed you see through them to other parts of the garden, whose corners were marked by Pheasant Tail grass, Stipa arundinacea.

The rusty-brown look used on walls and big, square planting boxes (picked up again in his clever choice of flag iris), was achieved using Cortensteel, one of the more fashionable materials to emerge from this year's show.

Meanwhile, Diarmuid Gavin has sold his award-winning Lollipop Garden to PoD nightclub owner John Reynolds, writes Helen Rogers at Chelsea.

The design caused a sensation at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2004 when it won a Silver Gilt Medal. Gavin did not succeed in getting a garden into the show this year, but he was guest speaker on Friday at a lavish champagne lunch in the hospitality section, hosted by Ross McParland of Sherry FitzGerald New Homes. McParland brought over 220 guests, including some of Ireland's leading developers, to the garden event of the year in London and where everyone agreed it was one of the best ever Chelsea shows . . . when the rain lifted.

UP WEXFORD!

FOR the first time since Mary Reynolds bewitched the judges with her new-age Celtic garden several years back, an Irish exhibit, apparently the first Irish nursery to ever stage a display in the great flower pavilion, has taken a well-deserved and very prestigious gold medal at Chelsea, which is only awarded when you are judged to have reached a certain very high standard, just like the Olympic Games.

Let's hear it for Wexford and Kilmurry Nurseries, owned and run by Orla and Paul Woods, outside Gorey. Their display was beautifully done, with each and every lovely plant grown to perfection by them on the nursery at home, including a divine pale apricot foxglove from their own selected seed strain, a gorgeous Verbascum 'Violetta', a very nice and most useful (for interweaving) spidery white Lychnis cuculi 'White Robin', a stand of yellow Asphodeline lutea and a great show of shinyleaved Chatham Island forget-me-nots, Myosotidium hortensia, one of their specialities.

Paul and Orla are no strangers to success at home, where their displays have won them prizes at all the major retail and trade shows and the blessing and backing of Horticulture Ireland at Bord Bia, who were there in force on the day. The Woods's were happy in the marquee and not just because it was shelter from the 40mph winds and bucketing rain outside. They were among friends there, some of whom they knew from other shows.

"It's like a travelling circus or road show, where every one is very friendly, helpful and not at all competitive, " they said.