Small but perfectly formed

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Having drifted around Ellerslie, with its acres of space, 2ha did not sound much land on which to stage a festival of 31 gardens and dozens of other displays.

What's more, the third Singapore Garden Festival (SGF) was staged under cover at the Suntec convention centre.

Organised by Singapore's National Parks Board, visitor numbers were limited to 300,000 across the eight-day event.

Yet despite what could have been drawbacks - the venue made photography tricky - the range and quality of exhibits underscored the festival's reputation as Asia's top garden show.

The key element seems to be the choice of designers. Entry was by invitation only, so there were top-flight designers from 17 countries, from as far away as Grenada, in the Caribbean, but the host country still scored highly.

John Tan ("The Tree House - Modern Kampong Lifestyle") and Damian Tang ("The Mysterious Jungle of Pandora") took best in show in the landscape and fantasy gardens respectively.

Among other Singaporean successes, Peter Cheok, whose 2008 best in show design "Seeking Shangri-La" was re-created at last year's Ellerslie International Flower Show in Christchurch, won gold for his landscape garden "Taking a Leaf", and in the same section, R. P. Jickky's "Mystic Rain Forest" also won a gold award.

It took 250,000 tropical and temperate plants to create the festival exhibits and the winning gardens, constructed by local companies under the designers' watchful eyes, were lush creations.

Cool and green was the look for the majority of the display gardens, including Australian Jim Fogarty's gold-medal "Daintree", inspired by the world heritage rainforest in north Queensland.

Fogarty also won the SGF Horticulture Excellence Award for best plant use and plant quality.

Dozens of stainless steel wheelbarrow trays were used in the fantasy exhibit "Homage Aux Jardiniers", by French duo Agnes Daval and Gabriel Milochau. The barrows, filled with aquatic plants, paid tribute to gardeners over the ages as well as evoking the journey of plants from one land to another. Ironically, some of the barrows contained water hyacinths, one of the world's worst aquatic weeds.

Alongside the cool, green gardens was "An African Fantasy", inspired by sub-Saharan ruins, and in sharp contrast, the use of strong colours, particularly Wang Hong Cheng's traditional red Chinese structures and Malaysian Inch Lim's "Yesterday's Dream", which recaptured early colonial Singapore in an exuberant mix of Asian and European plants, some grown in Milo tins.

But for bold colour, nothing came close to the displays at the Singapore Orchid Show, two floors below the gardens.

Orchid groups and commercial outlets from 12 countries went wild with banks of tropical orchids, rare and common, delicate and blowsy, white to magenta. There was a serious side, too. Singapore's President S. R. Nathan said at the prizegiving: "[With] the Singapore Garden Festival, we are also marking a new phase in our development as a garden city.

"Going forward, we will transform Singapore into a City in a Garden, where the whole country is one beautiful tropical garden within which our urban infrastructure is nestled."

The SGF will next be held in 2012 and I'm already making travel plans.