Features: Chelsea camaraderie

Creating a perfect garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show is as much about how you cope with the things that go wrong as about what you do right. It's a lucky exhibitor who doesn't have at least one disaster during the build-up - but admitting defeat just isn't an option.

For those building their first show garden at Chelsea, like James Wong and David Cubero, it can be a very steep learning curve.

"I don't think I'll be using succulents again," says James ruefully. The leaves of the moody purple aeoniums which are a such feature of his garden, 'The Canary Islands Spa Garden', proved as brittle as china.

"In the Canary Islands there aren't any large mammals, so I think they're just not used to getting big things brushing up against them," said James. "They snap so easily. We got over that by just having lots and lots of them, and only using the best ones."

It didn't stop there. A trolley carrying a delicate species of kalanchoe which has farina - a powdery white coating - on the leaves must have moved while it was travelling to Chelsea in the lorry. The farina was wiped off the edges of the plants, and though they were almost perfect, that's not good enough for Chelsea: they had to go.

"You can become slightly obsessed," says James. "You find errors that only someone with a magnifying glass looking under a leaf would notice."

For less unusual plants, you can always fall on the mercy of your fellow exhibitors. There's a real camaraderie between designers and exhibitors at Chelsea: when things go wrong, everyone pulls together to help where they can. It's common to see designers in hot pursuit of trolleys full of plants, hoping to persuade their owners to part with a few.

"You look at all the trolleys going past and you say, ah, there's some ferns! I wonder if they're going to use all those?" says Tom Hoblyn, designer of 'The Foreign and Colonial Investments' Garden', his first full show garden at Chelsea. Earlier this week he found he was badly short of ferns and 'filler' plants, used to cover up the mechanics of the garden.

The trolleys he chased turned out to belong to Andy McIndoe at Hillier Nurseries, who with 63 gold medals under his belt is a past master at pulling off the impossible. He was happy to hand over his ferns, as well as a few hostas, and Tom gave him a clutch of spare sarracenia in return. You'll find them in the pond at the side of the Hilliers stand: they weren't in the original design plan.

Nearly every garden has a similar tale of disaster averted: in 'Entente Cordiale', the courtyard garden Janet Honour designed with Patricia Thirion, all the delphiniums refused to come into flower, and they were left with no blue for their red, white and blue colour scheme. A last-minute substitution with Anchusa 'Loddon Royalist' averted that disaster; then they found they didn't have enough filler plants.

Several aquilegias and some foxgloves were borrowed from Cardiff City Council, and two of the fastigiate yews were donated by Chris Beardshaw and his mentoring students, who had too many for their urban garden 'Dawn Chorus'.

"Thank goodness for the generosity of people here," says Janet Honour, with feeling. It's a sentiment many on the showground would echo wholeheartedly.