My first garden at Chelsea was more cottagey than I'd choose to create now but contains some themes that have remained constant in my work. I'm interested in conceptual ideas in gardens; I think a garden has more substance if it's based around more than just what it looks like. In practical terms, this means perhaps using the history of a site as a starting point, or making some subtle reference to the wider arts (my Hampton Court garden, "The Traveller's Garden", was, for instance, inspired by both a poem and a painting).

For Somerset Revival I was inspired by the idea of rural regeneration and so showed the same 'scene' both before and after renovation. On the left, the old barn building is derelict (you should have seen the look on the face of the young landscaper when the window was smashed - he didn't realise it was meant to be like that and thought we had gone mad!).

There are tractor tyre ruts full of water; lots of wildflowers (this was before they became trendy); a dead cider apple tree; some old metalwork and an upturned milk churn. On the restored side I used the old bricks and roof tiles to create paths and edgings; an old cider press was turned into a water feature, a milk churn planted with Phlox Chattahoochee (also before it became trendy) and the bulk of the garden planted with cultivated forms of the wildflowers in the derelict half.