Trends at Tatton Flowers at Tatton this year looked good enough to eat, with berry colours in hot colour schemes creating a rich, luxurious look using some fabulous plants.

Chic colours at the show

Wine-coloured, elegant Allium sphaerocephalon and burgundy Phormiums were underplanted with the near-black foliage of Heuchera or contrasted with bright scarlets such as Achillea millefolium ‘Red Velvet‘.

When you put all these warm colours together it changes the mood

“When you put all these warm colours together it changes the mood,” said designer Andy Walker, who used purple phormiums and copper-coloured Agastache 'Firebird”'against a vivid red wall in his stunning back-to-back garden Siesta (gold). “When you look at it and you combine it with warm colours in hard landscaping it really does give you a lift.”

The show garden A Personal Journey (gold) used the same techniques, placing purple heucheras and fiery orange achilleas against rich red walls. And Finchale Training College made the daring choice of salmon-pink for the walls of their back-to-back garden Life and Soul (silver), in an unlikely but successful combination with magenta-pink monardas, red crocosmias and yellow coreopsis.

Cool as ice

Right at the other end of the colour scale, ice-cool combinations of green, white and blue were popular with designers evoking clouds, bubbles and chic minimalism.

The Bubble Garden (gold, best in show) used blue and white agapanthus together against green clipped box balls and Pennisetum alopecuroides ‘Hameln’ to make a perfect foil to white walls, silver fountains and, of course, translucent bubbles. In Spaced Out (gold), designers Ann Picot and Pasquale Pascucci conjured up clouds and sky by pairing blue agapanthus with Echinacea purpurea ‘White Swan’, a lovely plant with elegant ivory petals and one of the most popular at the show this year. Green lawns and clipped box spheres made a cool, calm contrast.

And in the back-to-back garden East Meets West (silver-gilt), china blue delphiniums, white astilbes and silver Cineraria maritima picked up the colours in the mosaic paths for an exquisite garden inspired by Islamic traditions.

Trees as architecture

The architectural shapes of exotic trees really made an impact at Tatton this year. The bone-hardy Chusan palm,Trachycarpus fortunei vied with the prehistoric tree fern, Dicksonia antarctica to lend a certain craggy elegance to many show gardens.

The moving fronds create shadows on the wall

“The moving fronds create shadows on the wall,” said Philippa Probert, who used Dicksonias of varying heights and ages to create a forest effect in her show garden, Forest Fusion (silver-gilt). “They’re full of character - each one is different and you can get them to do different things. Each one I’ve chosen is bending in an unusual way, and they even change shape as the fronds age and droop down.”

John Everiss’s fabulous garden Into the Light (silver-gilt) also used dicksonia as the sculptural framing for a rusted-iron tunnel, using its ancient dignity to add weight to a cool planting of ferns, hostas and palest pink sidalcea.

Trachycarpus fortunei looked just as primaeval, with rugged bark topped by palm-like fronds, and Andy Johnson had used it as an effective punctuation mark in his modern small garden, Picture This (silver-gilt). And in another very modern planting, they could be found marching up the sides of the Brewin Dolphin Garden (silver) underplanted with green hummocks of hebe against white walls for a clean, minimalist look.