After a glorious week of attention, what happens to the gardens after the show? We investigate what the future holds for some Chelsea gardens.

The last few hours of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show are always a bitter-sweet moment. After the excitement of the 4pm sell-off, the gardens are a shadow of their former selves. They are broken up and the plants and landscaping taken away or sold.

This year, an unusually high number of the gardens will live on after Chelsea. One of them is Chris Beardshaw’s Wormcast Garden, which won a gold medal and the BBC RHS People’s Award for best show garden.

"The garden is going back in part to Boveridge House, in Dorset and will form part of the on-going restoration there," says Chris. "So it’s got a life outside Chelsea, I’m pleased to say."

Five of the 19 show gardens will be recreated elsewhere. The silver-medal winning Barnsley House Spa Garden goes back to Gloucestershire to become part of designer Rosemary Verey’s old garden, now a country hotel. The Leeds City garden, which won a bronze medal, is also being rebuilt at the White Rose Office Park in south Leeds.

Others won’t be reconstructed, but the planting will be re-used. For example, the extraordinary plants in the 100% New Zealand Garden, which includes some rare and endangered species shipped over from New Zealand, will go to the new Bicentenary Glasshouse at RHS Wisley in Surrey.

But the most unusual reincarnation has to be that of the Gorilla Garden, a silver medal winner, whose lush African rainforest planting will soon become home to real gorillas as part of the new gorilla enclosure at London Zoo.