Mediterranean Courtyard Garden

Although the show is supposed to be all about plants and gardens, it mostly seems to me to consist of lorries parked all over my ever greening (except for this) park, and workmen in hard hats eating sausage rolls sitting on dumper trucks. Adding to the many construction projects currently surrounding my area (hey, it's Summer now, the perfect time for dust and drilling), the Chelsea Flower Show is much less glamorous when seen from the Site Entrance.

Having said that, the illusion is maintained once inside this horticultural theme park. The small gardens are always the most charming - more humble and somehow less pretentious than their full-sized brethren, they present an accessible face of green fingered excellence. The hollyhocks stand tall and symmetrical, even the bees are well behaved.

Only the British could turn gardening into a competitive sport, and Chelsea is the decorative but useless garden's Olympics.

But there's something almost eerie about the Provencal cottage garden, the Italian courtyard, the Melbourne hideaway. And then it strikes you - it's the lack of people on these perfect sets. It's not as though the owner could have just popped inside the charming rustic shack for a cup of tea - these are gardens that preclude the presence of human imperfection. A human shadow would be an unwanted prop, complicating the simple lines and spoiling the play of light and shade with their lumbering forms. These are perfect miniatures where only the Borrowers could be truly at ease.

Contrast this with the scene from a true courtyard garden near Gloucester Road. The front of this terraced house is, indeed, a courtyard - little of horticultural note or merit grows in the higgledy piggledy pots, the stone slabs a dull shade of grey and the whole thing protected from prying eyes by an ineffectual and flimsy hedge. But in this garden, since the weak dawning of Spring brought the West light, an elderly Middle Eastern couple sit every evening. They share a white cast iron table, often laid out with a Turkish coffee set, the tall, bulbous stove top coffee pan resting in between them, two small glass cups and a sugar bowl. She wears large black sunglasses and strokes her hennaed hair, while he is nut brown with silver strands atop. The world looks in on them and they look out, seemingly unseeing the passers by. Wrapped up in the moment of tranquillity, that surely has been given them in recompense for long years lived with this earth.

Now that's a courtyard garden I could aspire to have - but not just yet perhaps.