THE PATIO POVERA: ANTHONY SAMUELSON

It is probably safe to say that there is no garden in the world quite like Anthony Samuelson's. The winner of a silver gilt medal at the 2007 Chelsea Flower Show - subsequently returned, of which more later - has plants growing in the most unlikely places: from a washing machine, a typewriter, printers, television sets, ladderback chairs, computer monitors and a vacuum cleaner. You name it, it sprouts.

This enthusiasm for planting everyday objects and defunct consumer durables began some years ago when Tony's late wife Carol became ill and he wanted to create a patio where she could sit out near the kitchen door. "We had a Dixonia Antarctica (Tree Palm) from Tasmania which had outgrown its pot," he recalls. "There was an old water tank in the yard which had been taken out of the loft. The gardener was getting a hacksaw to cut off the ballcock but I turned it upside down in the tank so it looked as if the Dixonia was underplanted with the ballcock. Then I realised it was art."

This was the genesis of Tony's Patio Povera theme, based on the 1970s Arte Povera movement, which used everyday objects as the basis for art. When he decided to enter for Chelsea - "even though I had never been to a flower show up till that point, let alone designed a garden" - he developed the theme and extended it to include references from famous paintings and works of art.

His rooftop garden featured Mr and Mrs Andrews, Gainsborough's famous portrait in the National Gallery. In Tony's version, she wore a fully planted dress and had a rubber chicken planted with sage on her lap (a nod to a modern work, Chicken Knickers, by Sarah Lucas) while he sported a sprouting Victorian 'bathing suit' tailored from hessian cloth and a television screen for a head. "We had 20 outfits all sown at slightly different times so that as they became stalky and tired-looking they could be replaced."

In a reference to a work by the French painter whom Tony calls the Egregious Greuze, the bottom half of two naked shop display figures were planted with Helichrysum petiolare (Licorice Plant) & Ophiopogon planiscapus 'Nigresiens' (Black Grass). They were topped with a plate glass oval on which sat a birdcage containing a pair of bright red 1960s boots.

The garden took months of planning, six weeks of prefabrication and final preparation and cost Tony around £70,000. He is grateful for the help he received from the Totteridge Horticultural Society, among many others, in helping him grow some of the hundreds of specimen plants required.

To Tony's immense disappointment the garden, entered in the rooftop section, won Best in Show in its category, but was not awarded a gold medal. "It seems that I was marked down because I relied too much on hard landscaping, but mine was the only garden that actually looked like a roof," he says. "It was also one of the most popular in the show. Pictures of it were all over the Media and it was surrounded with crowds six deep. I did not go to Chelsea to come back with silver gilt. No one at the RHS wanted to talk about it so I sent the medal back to them."

"I love watching things grow. I am not a religious person but if you look at what comes from a tiny seed it is proof of the existence of God. But staging a garden in Chelsea is Hell on Earth. Even before the show I said that it was a once in a lifetime thing. I was simply never going to have another garden in me."

Today the remains of the Chelsea garden are scattered across Tony's yard, among other examples of the Patio Povera concept, about which he is writing a book. He loves the fact that Mrs Andrews' dress has been stripped of its majesty and now consists of clumps of decomposing plants, while a few dry bits of straw hang from the head that was once crowned with Stipa capillata (Needle Grass). "Plants decaying and dying are an essential part of Nature," he says with a trace of sadness. "More proof of God's presence in Nature and in life itself."

"The best thing I did was to bring the garden back to Totteridge. When I go out there, it is like seeing a bunch of good old friends. I want to say: 'We were at Chelsea together, my old mates, weren't we?"

Barbara Elton