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Fetzer show garden and the Fetzer Winery, California, USA

Even on the gloomy wet show Press Day, this garden shone.

The gold medal winning 'Fetzer Sustainable Winery Garden' designed by Kate Frey was absolutely stunning and avoided the guilt factor since all this colour and beauty was created using green principles.

Fetzer do not pay lip service to sustainability - they do this for real in their business.

© Fetzer Vineyards

The philosophy of Fetzer Vineyards is to look after the environment while producing their wines, so their vineyard and winery in California runs on renewable energy (including a solar-powered bottling plant) and they cultivate the vines according to organic principles, feeding the soil with compost created from the plant waste, protecting the soil with green manures and plants that sustain beneficial creatures for pest control, and looking after the water sources by caring for the riverbanks, ensuring waste water is treated (with UV light) so that it can be re-used in the winery cultivating, and generally conserving the local wildflowers by encouraging their growth.

Some of the flowering annuals that we grow in our gardens in the UK are in fact Californian wild flowers that smother the hillsides in sheets of colour in spring before the heat of the summer dries up the vegetation.

Here, the dry infertile serpentine soils (containing high magnesium, low calcium and many heavy metals) are inhospitable to many plants - only the select few can survive. One of these is Californian poppy (Eschscholzia californica). Not just flowering plants but grasses too, although many have been smothered by more aggressive European grass species introduced accidentally through imported feed for livestock. So every pocket of land that encourages Californian native plants is precious to the region for maintaining the habitats of native creatures.

See: Fetzer garden details

See: Photos: Fetzer show garden