: Gardening: Showcase Sensations.

THE horticultural world has taken the Royal Horticultural Society's Tatton Park flower show to its heart at long last - and even the weather suited the occasion.

The show, billed as ``Chelsea coming to Cheshire'', was launched four years ago to an avalanche of complaints as poor traffic management caused gridlock for miles around the Cheshire country estate of Tatton Hall. Visitors with the patience to gain admission commented that the occasion was no more than an excellent country-style show.

But this year's event opened on Wednesday to widespread approval with superbly designed gardens and floral displays, the best definitely living up to that ``Chelsea'' tag.

Halsall landscape gardener Peter Tinsley won a gold medal with his recreation of a Lake District scene using 50 tons of Lakeland stone.

Formby landscaper Dougie Knight is a gold medal veteran of Chelsea, Southport and other shows. In a recent book on Chelsea's outstanding gardens over the years, his creations of formidable rockwork and tumbling water earned him the soubriquet ``King of Rock!'' (with apologies to Elvis).

At Tatton Park this year, his mountain waterfall garden is softened with golden and purple-tinted flowers and a selection of graceful, trailing trees - beech, laburnum, maples and many others. He now exhibits only at the Tatton event where visitors find his gardens as dramatic and appealing as ever. Although he won only a bronze medal this year, one admirer from Cheshire was so impressed when he had a sneak preview that he bought the garden for pounds 40,000 before the show opened.

Dougie's daughter Jackie Knight, who has built her own reputation as a rock-and-water landscape gardener, has created `A Midsummer Knight's Dream', a garden with a boulder-strewn torrent crashing down from a tranquil sitting area, which won a silver medal. Swaying grasses and drifts of perennials with contrasting foliage give a dreamlike quality. Fairy statuettes emphasise the theme while, on the preview day, Jackie's children Samantha, 4, and Oliver, 2, frolicked in the garden as a fairy and an elf.

Garden designers Stephanie and Toby Hickish from Bala exhibit a naturalistic woodland garden in support of the Marie Curie Cancer Fund. Features include trees, colourful herbs and flowers, and a stream starting on a hill, meandering through the garden and returning to its source. The fund's symbol of hope, the daffodil, was represented in five-foot replicas made by Tarporley blacksmith Mathew Hallett from recycled oil drums. They won a bronze medal.

The Alpine Garden Society's North West members have staged a garden, organised by John Dower of Frodsham and filled with marvellous flowering plants. Among them is vivid pink-flowered Tacitus bellus, a form of houseleek from Mexico, which is not thought to be on sale in Britain but ``grows like a weed'' as stock is passed between society members.

The unusual focus of Tarporley-based Cheshire Herbs' luxuriant display is Datura stramonium, a form of thorn apple said to be much sought-after for its hallucinogenic properties in its native habitat along the Limpopo River.

Among the smaller back-to-back gardens, Wrexham designer Ninanne Sheridan and Angela Mainwaring have produced a garden for the Royal UK Beneficent Association, which helps older people remain independent. The garden, awarded a silver-gilt medal, celebrates the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren by combining fairytale elements - a tumbledown tower, topiary goose and giant chessboard.

Cheshire County Council has made a group of four back-to-back exhibits to highlight aspects of its work, including an imaginative farmhouse setting typical of those on the Cheshire Cycleway, which the council is promoting to support the rural economy.

For keen kitchen gardeners, Ken Muir's stand displays not only the familiar top-class strawberries but also an interesting range of fruits grown specially for small gardens - apples and pears grown as columnar trees and apples as stepover cordons, redcurrants trained as standards, and peaches as fans and half-standards. The Lancashire firm of W. Robinson & Sons, famed for its giant and exhibition varieties of vegetable, includes an intriguing courgette, Trombonchino - easily trained to climb and producing curved fruits 30cm (1ft) long.

A unique feature of the Tatton show is Britain in Bloom's new national flowerbed competition, which has attracted 19 colourful entries from councils. Sefton stages a Royal Jubilee display with 1,500 plants forming a large central crown and bright bedding.

Gardening trends reflected at the show include the continuing appeal of water, a rising interest in foliage plants - and a return to paved patios after the passing fancy of decking. Perhaps I blinked, but I did not see a single example of Ground Force-type decking, while stylish stone terraces and sitting areas were everywhere. The interest in non-flowering plants has grown to such an extent that the show dedicated a marquee to a ``festival of foliage'', from hostas to tree ferns - though after the reports of environmental damage to Australia's tree-fern forests, I'm never comfortable with the idea of growing them.

l The show, at Tatton Park, near Knutsford, continues today (10am-7pm) and tomorrow (10am-5pm). Tickets cost pounds 17 (children 5-15 pounds 5, under-fives free).