In the afternoon, I have to have my annual breast cancer check up. It will be two weeks before I get the results from my various tests.

Wednesday 8th
I pick up Ann and Doreen, my two nursery workers and take them to Longstanton. We have an enormous number of plants, which have come in from Rosy Hardy, to pot on. We are still having Vole problems, though around about lunchtime, the girls found a dead Vole in our Jacobs Ladder plants. Voles 50, humans 1!

Thursday 9th
Another day working in the tunnel. The day starts with the delivery of a pallet of compost which has to be hand hauled across Amanda's lawn. It's a good job that the ground is very dry at the moment or Amanda would have no lawn left.

Monday 13th
I spend the morning with Mick from i-dash. Mick is the technical wizard who ensures that we have our web cams on the garden set up from day one. This year we have a number of problems, not least of which is that we cannot start build until the 5th of May, three days later than when we were building on the Rock Bank. As we are on the Great Marquee side of Main Avenue this year, we have to wait until the Great Marquee has been erected before we can start to build the garden. We also have problems on the side of the road, with supply of power and phone lines which, when we backed onto the RHS Administration cabins on the Rock Bank, never presented us with difficulties. This year we are going to have to use generators to power the computers needed for the web cams, until mains power is connected - which could be as late as halfway through the build. Sourcing generators and power cells has been Mick's problem. He is also responsible for liaising with BT and our broadband supplier to make sure that, once we have a phone line, we can be connected to a server. We had big problems with this last year as, despite Mick's best efforts, although we had both a server and a web cam, getting us connected up in the local BT exchange took several days. We are hoping to avoid this problem this year with a hefty programme of 'nagging' well in advance. We have devised a new system of managing our Pan, Tilt and Zoom camera, which in the past we have had to take up and down depending on build. This year we are hoping to site the camera on its pole in a sleeve so that, if the camera does need to moved for a short while, we don't have to drag Mick's workforce into central London to do it.

Tuesday 14th
Today we have a Chelsea itinerary meeting with Kevin White, from Squires Landscapes, David Houghton, from Kings Landscapes (who is doing the trees), Phil Game, Amanda and myself. The object of the exercise was to make a preliminary plan for the Chelsea build-up. We try to brainstorm all the possible disaster scenarios that could befall us during the two weeks of build. One of our greatest problems this year is the fact that we need to use a crane for three days in order to get our trees into position - some of which weigh four and half tons! And that's not counting the stumpery, which is really heavy! The RHS have told us that we can only have two days of cranage, Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th of May. Two relatively quiet days on site. We spend some considerable time building up an hour by hour schedule for collecting, transporting, unloading and then planting the 25 trees needed to create the woodland. I just know that this is going to be a nightmare, but we have done everything we can to ensure that the whole operation runs smoothly. We will have our final itinerary meeting next month. Normally we only have one meeting but the logistics of this year's build are so complex that we need another meeting to ensure that we have done everything humanly possible to anticipate any problems which may arise. At 4 o'clock I have to go and pick up a van as tomorrow we have great fun and games in store, digging up water plants at Cuttlebrook Koi Farm.

Wednesday 15th
I spend the day with Amanda, Phil and Colin Walton-Smith at Cuttlebrook Koi Farm, which is owned by an old friend of mine, Mark Davis. Mark and I met some years ago when he was doing a water garden at Hampton Court. A gold medal winning designer in his own right, Mark has loads of ex-show water plants dumped around the margins of his Koi ponds. He has very kindly offered to let me have as much marginal vegetation as I need for the pond in the Garden of Dreams. A great day watching Phil and Colin up to their chests in icy water (they were wearing chest waders), digging out a variety of species from hot sedge to gypsy wort, none of which you can find in your average garden centre. It was a successful day, and we left with the van was full to the roof with tubs and crates of wonderful clumps of water plants.

Thursday 16th
I pick up Ann and Doreen and take them to the nursery. It takes us over an hour to unload all the plants we got yesterday. They now have the unenviable task of potting up all this material into manageable containers. At 4 o'clock I have to return the van and take Ann and Doreen home.

Friday 17th
The huge pallet on which we will be constructing the stumpery has been delivered to Fenstanton. Phil has returned from Sweden to start building this focal piece, using an enormous heap of beautiful driftwood pieces, courtesy of Driftwood Natural Sculptures.

Monday 20th
We have had to hire a three ton all-terrain forklift, and elicit the help of Kings Landscapes, as the driftwood roots, especially those at the base of the stumpery, cannot be moved by one person alone. At the end of a busy day flying around the county on other jobs, I call in at Fenstanton to admire the first layer of roots. The whole thing looks enormous at the moment. Phil has actually decided to take a metre off the length of the pallet. Apparently, we have to be very careful not to go over the edges on the width - as this would exceed our maximum load in transportation without need of a police escort! At a cost of £2,500, we certainly want to avoid that, if possible.

Tuesday 21st
Phil has had a meeting with the people who are going to be transporting the stumpery. We are going to use a lorry with its own crane to move it - a 12 tonne hiab, one of the largest that our haulage company, Millbank, can supply. Any larger and we will need a police escort for that too!

Wednesday 22nd
I pick up Ann and Doreen early this morning and take them to the nursery. I then have to fly down to Hertfordshire for our monthly 4head meeting. This month we are missing Steve, who is flat out in the studio, Phil, who really can't afford to take a day off while we have manpower and forklifts on hire, and Amanda, who is working in the nursery helping Ann and Doreen. I take with me a first draft of the garden leaflet. As I know that we are going to be incredibly busy this year during April, especially with the plant growing, I want to get all the other little jobs out of the way. The garden leaflet frequently gets left until the last minute. In the nursery we have a problem with space – we are running out of it, and there are a number of plants which we are holding which will need very little care in the run up to the show. I have asked Heather, my co-designer, if she can look after species like Ivy, Euphorbia and Vinca and some grasses. These species just need to be watered from now until May and they will do their thing without any messing about. Heather has kindly offered to take these off our hands, thus giving us more room for plants which may need a little encouragement to flower.

Thursday 23rd
We pick up a van and load all the plants to be taken to Heather's. It is a foul day and Colin, who has been rained off one of his regular jobs, volunteers to come and help us. Just loading and unloading these plants takes hours. We arrive at Heather's and she is well prepared with a large roll of Mypex and an enviable amount of space in which to put the plants. We also collect a huge bag of oak leaves which have been painstakingly gathered by Bonnie Williams, one of our PR Ladies. Bonnie has a huge oak tree in her garden and I think she has collected nearly every leaf that has fallen off it in the Autumn and Winter. These are now being stored in Heather's barn, along with the huge bunches of bracken which we have gathered and need to store in a dry environment, to stop the mould.

Friday 24th
We still have the van today and Philip and Colin help load all the potted water plants into the van to take them to the huge glass house we have rented in Sandy. At the moment all that is in the glass house is the hedge which will run along the back of the garden. We now have to construct a number of large ponds out of scaffold boards and off-cuts of liner, kindly provided by Mark Davis. The water plants need some encouragement if they are to be tall enough to make a good impression around the pond margin, so keeping them under glass should give them the early start they need now that they are all in their new pots with brand new soil. We finish at four and rush to get the van back by the end of play. The stumpery is now looking good but needs some more roots as we have run out, and it still lacks a roof. Magnus Harding, of Natural Dirftwood Sculptures, pulls out all the stops in order to deliver more roots, first thing on Monday morning.



Monday 27th
The roots don't arrive until quite late in the afternoon on Monday. It looks as if we are going to need to keep the big forklift for another couple of days. The stumpery is beginning to look amazing.

Tuesday 28th
It looks as if our Vole problem is subsiding. We have found three more dead Voles in the tunnel over the last week and the damage to our seedlings and young plants seems to have abated. Back at Fenstanton, the stumpery is almost complete; we just need one large root fan to cap the roof. I phone Magnus Harding who tells me he has just the piece in his yard, but he won't be able to get it to me for a couple of weeks, and Phil returns to Sweden tonight. What a month!