Tom Stuart-Smith is the hot designer of the moment, the odds favourite to win at Chelsea Flower Show - and today he was honoured with the "best in show" award.

Stuart-Smith, who designed the Laurent-Perrier Garden, beat rivals including Diarmuid Gavin, Andy Sturgeon and Arabella Lennox-Boyd, who was making a long-awaited return to Chelsea after an absence of eight years.

Designed as a "contemplative place with a dreamy and slightly surreal character", the garden features 30-yearold hornbeams overlooking a seemingly-random pattern of planting crisscrossed with paths of Flemish brick.

Lady Lennox-Boyd's Daily Telegraph garden won a gold medal - her sixth - while golds also went to Sturgeon's garden for Cancer Research UK and Cleve West, who designed a " stimulating but safe" garden for dementia patients for Bupa.

One of the most popular winners was George Harrison's widow Olivia, whose garden in memory of her husband - From Life To Life, designed with Yvonne Innes - won a silver-gilt medal. The garden tells the tale of the late Beatle's life in four stages.

Silver-gilt also went to the Daylesford Organic Summer Solstice garden, one of several reflecting the popularity of the grow-your-own movement. It is an organic agrarian garden, with a green wheat field - a Chelsea first.

The show, in the Royal Hospital grounds, opened its doors to the public today. Now in its 86th year, some 157,000 people will visit the event, which runs until Saturday.

At the opening party attended by Lady Thatcher, Sir John Major and William Hague, the weather was so cold that partygoers were forced to don fur coats and thermal vests to keep warm.

Meanwhile an attempt to display one of the world's rarest orchids at Chelsea has been thwarted by Customs officials. Four ghost orchids from the Cayman Islands, intended for the Cayman Islands' Heritage Garden, were impounded in the Netherlands because they did not have the right paperwork.

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