It’s taken us longer than we expected but Tony and his team have been putting the finishing touches to the hard landscaping on the Telegraph garden. The purbeck stone looks wonderful and contrasts well with the strong colour of the coreten steel. Andy is fairly well advanced with his planting as well so the garden is really taking shape.

It’s fair to say that we are a bit behind on the Daily Telegraph garden so the rush is on to get as much done as possible over the weekend. Andy is keen to start planting but we have lost a couple of days with the dry stone walling and this has impacted our programme. It’s not serious yet but we must finished one section today in order for us to have a chance of planting on Monday. One good thing is that the coreten is rusting up well and looks wonderful when the sun catches it. Andy was sufficiently worried about it last week that he wrote me an email saying “it would be fair to say that I am extremely worried about the coreten and whether it will rust in time”. Luckily it has! If you look at the blog entry on the 12th May, three days ago, you can see how much they have changed just in the last few days.

We have been making good progress on the Telegraph garden but the stone work has been slipping behind more and more. This morning one of the men working on the walling had to be rushed off to hospital with a heart murmur – I am pleased to say that he has been given a clear bill of health. However, we are running out of time and we need to get the walling finished. We diverted several people onto the work today but we can’t afford to let it interfere with our other work. Tony Collinson, who is the foreman on the garden, cam up with a good plan about bringing in some additional help. The only problem is that the chap we want is in Scotland so we are flying him down tomorrow to help us push on. Desperate measures!

We have just taken delivery of some of Andy’s more exotic plants that have come all the way from Sicily. Luckily they spent last night in a heated polytunnel otherwise the frost would have got to them. Marek, who is responsible for delicately loading the plants on to the trucks going to Chelsea, is looking proudly on.

We had a severe frost last night at the nursery which has certainly caused us quite a few problems, especially for those plants that we have just moved out of the polytunnels. However, the clear skies have brought the sun which makes progress on site so much easier. The majority of the coreten steel sections are now in and already you can see some of the interesting shadows that the structures will create. Have a look at the pine that is at the back of the photo. It weights 4 tonnes and is a wonderful sight. The remaining two are being positioned by crane this afternoon.

Andy was not sure whether to use Quercus suber (cork oak) in the garden or Pines and decided in the end on Pines. They are magnificent trees and weigh about 4 tonnes each. The forklift was struggling to move them so we have asked our next door neighbours, Willerbies, if we can borrow their crane to plant them. They have kindly agreed!

One of the interesting aspects of building a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show is that you get to go to a really varied number of places. Last year, whilst preparing for the Daily Telegraph’s garden with Ulf Nordfjell, I visited a wonderful quarry in northern Sweden. Maybe a deserted airfield near Braintree in Essex wasn’t quite so exotic but still quite interesting! In order for the coreten to develop a consistent rust colour, the steel needs to be sandblasted and this was what was happening to these sections. On Monday, they get delivered to site.