It’s six o’clock on Monday morning of Press Day at the Chelsea Flower Show. The only people in Great Pavilion are me, another photographer looking even more bleary than I am, a stern security guard with fierce looking dog - and Johnny Walkers of Walkers Bulbs who’s just arriving with his daffodils.

Yes, daffodils in May – fresh from the cold store. And they arrive on pallets, already arranged in their bowls ready to go on show on the blue coated tiered staging.

Outside, the gardens are besieged by the elite of garden photographers allowed in at 5am to shoot the gardens in the soft morning light. The crews building the outdoor show gardens always try to be finished by Sunday night so they’re ready for the mass attack of the shooters this morning.

But inside the Great Pavilion all is peace… This is great time to be here – everything’s quiet and you can almost hear the buds opening.

OK… quick coffee and back out to hunt down more new plant introductions. Seventy eight as of last night – and eight or nine more already this morning.

Here at the Chelsea Flower Show it’s the day before Press Day, judging and the Royal Visit. The rain fell, the wind blew, and an announcement was made that all garden sunshades and patio umbrellas should be folded because of the risk of damage.

Inside the Great Pavilion there were none of the dramas of years ago, before it was a modern prefabricated building, and the three acre canvas marquee rattled and swayed and a huge timber beam fell from the roof.

Many nurseries in the Great Pavilion were flaunting their new plants, which I’ll be reviewing for the rest of the week over on my Royal Horticultural Society New Plants blog, and this seems like to good time to mention just a few of the stand outs so far. When I’ve posted this I’ll be going to bed, sitting up compiling the full list.

A new rose named for the home of Prince Charles, ‘Highgrove’, featured on the stand from Peter Beales Roses and Prince Charles will be at the Show tomorrow to launch it. Two pink flowered hardy geraniums also stand out. Geranium sylvaticum ’Hilary’ from Hardys Cottage Garden Plants and the pink and white bicoloured G. phaeum ‘Mottisfont Rose’ on the Hardy Plant Society  stand which also features the first silver-leaved form of the American native doll’s eyes, Actaea pachypoda – it’s called ‘Pewter and Pearls’.

I was very taken with a huge new picotee Oriental lily from Hart’s Nursery called ‘Melissimo’ in white with a bright picotee edge as well as new bicoloured form of Pacific Coast Iris called ‘Broadleigh Fenella’ from Broadleigh Gardens. There was also a superb Cornus, raised at Rutgers University in New Jersey – of which more another time.

It’s Saturday and I’m finally down here at the Chelsea Flower Show, the most famous flower show in the world – the show opens Tuesday. Six hundred exhibitors, including 109 staging floral exhibits in the 12,000 square metre/three acre Great Pavilion, put it all together in just three weeks and it takes 800 people to make it happen. There are just thirteen outdoor show gardens, which can be up to 10mx22m/33x72ft in size. They’ve been known to cost more than £250,000 to create – for five days of public viewing – and the recession has reduced the number this year. But at first sight some look very impressive.

As I arrived at the show today to continue my coverage of Chelsea’s new plants that I began on 1 May on my Royal Horticultural Society New Plants blog, some exhibits were complete while most were in various stages of completion; there was some frantic activity on one or two of the show gardens while a few exhibitors in the Floral Pavilion had not even started.

Burnham Nurseries orchid exhibit (Grand Pavilion, D24) had finished and the pristine stand stood out vividly from the chaos around about. Next door, Devine Nurseries (Grand Pavilion, D23) had not yet arrived with their alliums. There’s confidence for you.

Also complete was a stand from Roger Platts Garden Design and Nurseries (Grand Pavilion, D20). Having built many show gardens outside, he knows the value of getting finished in good time. One feature I especially admired on his display entitled A Plantsman's Palette was a Banksian rose, Rosa banksiae ‘Lutea’ climbing through a Japanese maple. You’d need a more substantial maple in a real garden, but it looked wonderful.

I only flew in yesterday from Pennsylvania so I’m feeling a bit knackered, as they say over here. Time for a supper of good old British fish and chips -  and more tomorrow (reports, that is – not fish and chips).

You can check my new plants coverage over on my RHS New Plants blog.

The world famous Chelsea Flower Show opens in London on Tuesday and already for the last two weeks I’ve been posting about this year's new plant introductions at Chelsea on my Royal Horticultural Society New Plants blog. I’ll be at the show from tomorrow, checking out all the other new plants (like this clematis Diana's Delight from Raymond Evison) and bringing you the news over on my RHS New Plants blog. And posting here regularly too.

Yesterday I was mentioning the lovely, intriguing but all-too-vigorous little arum – the crowdipper, Pinellia ternata. And it reminded me to take a look and see how our variegated pinellia, P. tripartita ‘Dragon’s Tails’, is doing in the garden. It’s been there for a few years, spreading slowly. But now it’s dead.

It’s been a colorful and well-behaved little plant, but didn’t get through the coldest winter here in twenty five years. We’ll miss it.

I blogged about our pinellias here a couple of years ago. You can order Pinellia tripartita ‘Dragon’s Tails’ in North America from Plant Delights, and in Britain from Kevin Hughes Plants.

A few days ago I was speaking at the open days for Heronswood Nursery, a two and a half hour drive south of here and just outside Philadelphia. I’d have told you about it sooner if I hadn’t got so many plants that I needed to get in the ground before we head off to England for the Chelsea Flower Show tomorrow. In particular, I was delighted to be planting a new pink hybrid hellebore, ‘Rosemary’, which should be available here soon. Anyway…

Heronswood was founded on the west coast by Dan Hinkley and Robert Jones and is now part of the Burpee group on the east coast, and it’s clearly getting into gear in its new incarnation. Ros Creasy was also on the bill, with her inspiring presentation on her edible landscapes, and I discussed plants for small gardens – plants that give the extra value needed in small spaces.

But as well as making my presentations and talking to the many visitors to Fordhook Farm for the event, I had a chance to take a look at the developments in the gardens. It was a little late for their hellebores, which are a Heronswood specialty: Dan Hinkley began their hellebore breeding using stock sourced in England, Grace Romero continues the program with some splendid new introductions and more on the way. In fact the Heronswood hellebores were amongst the plants I had to get planted today.

But as I took a little time to explore the expanding plantings, there were two plants which caught my eye – one a universally admired perennial from England, and one viewed here in the US with rather more mixed feelings.

We all love Dicentra spectabilis, the tall Asian bleeding heart, but the gold-leaved version, ‘Gold Heart’, adds a whole new dimension to the shade garden – selected at Hadspen House garden in England buy Canadians Nori and Sandra Pope, it was a standout feature at Heronswood. Its foliage is golden yellow from the moment it peeps through the soil in spring and as the plant expands it lights up the landscape. Then the familiar long strings of bleeding hearts, in a paler shade than the usual green-leaved version, arch outwards. The result is a spectacular shade plant.

Another shade plant I came across in the Heronswood garden – well, let’s be fair, my wife judy spotted it first - is one of the classiest weeds you’ll ever find: Pinellia ternata, also known for some unfathomable reason as crowdipper.

This member of the Arum family (Araceae), a relative of the native Jack in the Pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum), with its green cowl and slender black tongue, seemed to have arrived in clumps of a variegated agapanthus and was spreading from there. It’s not at all flamboyant but this demure perennial is perhaps just too captivating for the gardeners’ own good. It's rarely offered by American nurseries, in Britain it's offered by these RHS Plant Finder nurseries.

With no cares about upsetting the anti-alien, native plant enthusiasts – I should have asked for some to take home. If it should escape outside the deer fence – it would be gone, so no danger. The Scott Arboretum would not agree.

Anyway… all in all it was a fascinating couple of days at Heronswood.

Lecturing near Traverse City in western Michigan, so many great sights to see.

First of all, driving north from Grand Rapids on the freeway, there were sheets of white Trillium grandiflorum in the woods. This was not a case of stopping in a rest area and hiking into the forest to see them, sailing along at 70mph they were obvious. Of course, parking up by the side of the freeway to study plants is asking for attention from passing cops. But then in a rest area, by the path to the bathroom, was a stupendous plant with the biggest white flowers I ever saw. And once I got off the freeway I did stop and study them. In our part of Pennsylvania, most of the trilliums I’ve seen have been inside a deer fence; the rest have all been eaten.

I also passed a Jeep Blessing… which seemed to be exactly that: literally hundreds of Jeeps parked in a field - presumably awaiting the attention of the priest. That’s something I’d never heard of.

And I also spotted a sign for the mysteriously named Fifth Third Arena. The Fifth Third? I discovered later that the stadium is named for the Fifth Third Bank whose name, it turns out, derives from a merger between the Fifth Bank and the Third Bank – not to create the Eighth Bank, or a bank with a more logical name like the MidWest Bank, but the Fifth Third Bank. And why were they called the Fifth Bank and the Third Bank in the first place? Very mysterious...

The waters of Lake Michigan were spectacular – just like the Florida Keys in their turquoise and azure coloring though you wouldn’t want to dip a toe in the water, not just yet. Where I was lecturing near Traverse City, on the shores of Lake Michigan, they had snow on the ground ten days ago.

Then, a unique experience. In my lecture on New Perennials I showed pictures of three of the new heucheras from France: ‘Caramel’, ‘Citronelle’ and then ‘Tiramisu’. After the lecture my thoughtful hosts from the Master Gardener Association of Northwest Michigan took me to visit a local nursery, Bellwether Gardens, and there I found, side by side on the sales bench, those same three new heucheras from France, on sale, lined up in exactly the same order: ‘Caramel’, ‘Citronelle’ and ‘Tiramisu’.

Heading back down south again I was just too late for the Dandelion Festival in Borculo, Michigan. Though you’d never know it from the report in the local paper, I gather there’s a prize for the largest dandelion flower, and also for the flower on the longest stem. But on a visit to the spectacular plant emporium that is Arrowhead Alpines, west of Lansing, I did find a more or less white one, Taraxacum albidum. That would certainly have taken the prize for the most unusual dandelion.