Sarah from Garden Design kindly sent me a link to the magazine’s Green Awards which is taking submissions until May this year. If you’re a garden design junkie you get to flick through images of beautiful design-based eco gardens; if you’re a garden designer you can submit one of your gardens.

One of my favourites so far is the Sculptural Chicago Rooftop and Urban Garden by dSpace Studio because, well, it’s on a roof and also features wonderful things like decking, sedum, grasses, native flowers, lavender and those unbelievable vintage Bertoia chairs.

I don’t usually like floor lights much – they often look bad in the daylight and blind you in the dark. But the lighting in this garden is really exceptional. Frosted plexi-glass lightboxes are totally at home in a swish little penthouse garden / living space like this.

I also like the Modern Organic Garden by Fusion Landscape Designs Inc based in Portland, Oregan (above). It’s a gorgeous earthy rain garden with bamboo details, bespoke earthwork by Fiddlescape Designs and a stone bench made using local basalt stone. The main feature is the tiger wood ‘boardwalk’ over the garden which seperates a small living area (with lovely textiles) from a main dining area and smaller children’s dining platform.

For some reason these designs strike me as being particularly American. Perhaps because they lack the huge variety of plants you usually see in British gardens. We tend to be less sleek and put-together, and also less focussed on outdoor living spaces due to the good old British weather (it’s another cold, grey day and apparently spring is going to be delayed by about a month this year). A more plant-based approach comes from Michelle Derviss in the form of her Mendocino Coast garden (banner pic and below).

The focus of this garden is on a climate-adaptive and drought-resistant planting scheme. Her painterly approach to using purple and pink heathers, dwarf conifers and ornamental grasses – most of them ground-hugging to accentuate and aid the natural contours of the landscape – forms a beautiful carpet of colours.

I can’t wait to see who wins!