Amateur Gardening magazine asked me to make a Show Garden for them at their annual gardening show near Bath so I leapt at the chance of creating something a little different for their mainly traditional audience.

Having just taken a group of Americans from the Ohio Governor's Residence around 23 traditional and contemporary Cotswold gardens, I was not surprised that it was the contemporary ones (such as Lady Farm near Bristol) that really captured their imagination. Many people have the misconception that contemporary gardens are all about concrete and spiky (or no) plants, whereas in fact I believe we're in a much softer space than that - contemporary style is very organic, and while modern materials can feature in new gardens, so too do wood, natural stone and water.

The garden I designed for Amateur Gardening was contemporary and deceptively simple - I say deceptively because in order to work successfully it had to be beautifully detailed and built with absolute precision - not an easy task with just a few days to build it. Its key features were having the plants wrapped around the outside of the garden, so that you viewed the interior through a mist of planting, and then a repetition of the same few elements, materials and colours to give it a sense of unity.