Features: Small gardens

The small gardens may have to squeeze a lot into a tight space, but that means they're overflowing with inspiration you can use in your own garden.

Paving the way

The fabulous mosaic path in Sarah Eberle's Credit Crunch garden, The Overdrawn Artist's Garden, cost her next to nothing. The steel grid was found in a scrapyard - as were all the materials used to make the pattern, from sand and gravel to crushed CDs. If you're re-doing this at home, you'd need to bind the pattern with resin to make it durable.

Another idea for simple yet effective paving is at The Pilgrim's Rest by Chris O'Donoghue. He's used crocks - bits of broken terracotta pot - for a charming yet hard-wearing cottage garden path. And if you're after livening up your paving, try following Andy McIndoe's example at the Hilliers stand in the Great Pavilion: he's cut circular holes out of his paving slabs and filled them with brightly-coloured gravel.

Going up the wall

This year vertical walls are more sophisticated than ever. Use them as stylish decorative panels - Mark Gregory plants his with minimalist Pratia pendiculata in The Children's Society Garden - or extend your veg garden by planting them with delicious baby salad leaves like Patricia Fox in Freshly Prepped for Aralia.

For a really unusual wall, try stacking logs (cut ends outermost), as seen in urban garden 1984. The texture is gorgeous and wildlife love it too. Or, if you're saving the pennies, cut up old pallets and stack them in patterns - the designers of Pottering in North Cumbria have done just that, tucking some tiny maidenhair spleenwort, Asplenium trichomanes into the cracks for natural charm.

Plants a go-go

Jamie Dunstan thins out his golden bamboo, Phyllostachys aureosulcata var. aureocaulis to single stems in The PSI Nursery Garden and plants them in a carpet of purple-tinged Trifolium repens for a funky, modern look. There's more quirky planting and a good lesson in how to harmonise planting with hard landscaping in A Japanese Tranquil Retreat, where the mauve-and-white wall precisely matches its shade to the alliums planted at its foot.

If you're planning a white garden, take a leaf out of Jeffery Hewitt's book and include some background plants in a contrasting colour. In his courtyard garden, Jacob's Ladder, he's used a purple-leaved form of Actaea racemosa as the perfect foil to white roses and white-rimmed hostas.

Saving the pennies

Eco-chic means Chelsea is full of junk this year - but with materials cleverly re-used so you'd never think it hadn't cost a fortune.

Instead of shelling out on expensive containers, David Domoney shows how with a little imagination you can have the funkiest of planters for free in his urban garden The Ace of Spades. He uses stacks of tyres, old oildrums and even a bike engine to grow plants in: you might not go for the heavy metal look, but any themed container display could be made like this, without spending a packet.

Another great container idea comes from Patricia Fox at Freshly Prepped - she's hung colanders from the pergola to grow strawberries in. Or you could follow the example of Ranelagh School's Learning to Grow and break up pallets - surely this year's must-have material - for veg beds. They've smartened them up with powder-blue paint which sets off the plants a treat.

Of course, if you're really strapped for cash, you could follow James May's example and opt for the ultimate in low-maintenance, low-cost gardening - and make your garden entirely out of modelling clay...