VAL BOURNE was among the calming green and white at this year's Chelsea flower show

I have recently come back from the best Chelsea Flower Show I have ever had. The sun shone, but not too warmly, so the Grand Pavilion sparkled throughout the week without getting tired and limp. The large show gardens were fabulous and there were an unprecedented eight Gold Medals and four Silver Gilts. The best in show was the Laurent Perrier Garden designed by Tom Stuart-Smith who won his third Best in Show award. I think that's a record too.

But some visitors were disappointed because three of the gold-medal winning gardens had a leafy palette of greens broken only by cool-white flowers - apparently some gardeners have to have a cacophony of colour before a garden wins their hearts and minds. There were colourful gardens in abundance - principally Cleve West's gold-medal winning Bupa garden, Leeds City Council's commemorative garden, the QVC garden of lemon-yellows and mauves and the vivid garden that celebrated George Harrison's life. There was also the earthy aboriginal garden staged by the hunky' Australian team who always centre everything about their barbie.

However, three headline-grabbing gardens chose serene greens and whites - Tom's, Arabella Lennox Boyd's (for the Daily Telegraph) and Robert Myers's Cadogan Square garden. The designers didn't collude as some imagined, but they may have been influenced subconsciously by last year's Linnaeus garden which was a Swedish study in plant cool'.

The plants tended to be sculptured and it was the combination of foliage that mattered - not the flowers. The stars of the show were the cloud-cut hornbeams imported from Germany. Crocus, the Internet suppliers, could have sold these 30-year-old trees a hundred times over. Apparently, they are considering tours to the German tree nursery so that customers can pick their own orient-inspired clipped hornbeams.

The noble fern Dryopteris wallichiana was popular too, and this dark-ribbed fern is an excellent performer in shade. The floppy green Japanese grass, Hakonechloa macra, popped up and all these designers use it in preference to the striped golden version Alboaurea' usually grown. Tom also used the ferny foliage of Selinum wallichianum, a noble umbellifer named after Danish botanist Nathaniel Wallich (1786-1851), and two white peonies with superb, glossy foliage and cupped flowers (White Wings' and Jan van Leeuwen') plus a rodgersia with horse-chestnut foliage, which was R pinnata, I think. The gardens were calming and looked stunning in evening light. So treat those white and green gardens as a masterclass not a disappointment. For foliage matters!

Notcutts at Nuneham Courtenay are holding a Rose Festival and Family Fun Weekend on Saturday and Sunday from 10.30am to 4.30pm. Mattocks Rose Garden will be open. Benefits the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association.