A group of gardening guerrillas has set up a hip alternative to the Chelsea Flower Show. Charlie Cooper meets them

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The moors shaped their work. But, dear reader, their gardening skills were prosaic at best

Picture the scene. It's somewhere near Ilkley, in West Yorkshire, and a young woman is carefully clearing rubbish from a piece of waste ground. Two teenage boys, dressed in hoodies and riding bikes, cruise past.

But as a nation of impassioned horticulturalists, we hardly need reminding why plants are our pride and joy, says Anna Pavord.

Cameron criticised for comparing horticulture to purely manual labour

Explore Britain's green and pleasant land, then set off around the world in search of all things bright and beautiful. Cathy Packe celebrates flower power.

As the clocks go forward, here are some tips to put a spring in your own step

In 1960 a woman applied for the post of exhibitions officer at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. She didn't get the job, but was able to show her interviewers her portfolio of flower paintings, and was engaged instead as an artist in the herbarium. This was Mary Grierson, soon to become recognised as one of the world's most distinguished botanical artists.

Lawns, patios and even trees – nearly everything in your backyard comes at a carbon price

They cheer up the dreariest of Februarys and there's 200 different varieties to choose from.

Slugs and snails have regained their crown as the most pesky pests to munch a destructive path through Britain's gardens. Having been toppled from their customary first place in 2010 by the viburnum beetle, they slithered back to the top of the list in 2011 as the pest gardeners most love to loathe.

If Carl Warner's photography looks good enough to eat, that's because it is. His landscape portraits are created entirely out of food. Trees are made from broccoli, the clouds are cauliflower and mountains are formed from piles of mashed potato. The result is a body of work that is irreverent, whimsical and fun. Warner created his first "foodscape" in 1999, after a trip to the market left him thinking how much Portobello mushrooms looked like trees. That led to Mushroom Savanna, which re-imagined the fungi as part of an African landscape.

What on earth did gardeners do before smartphones? Here we are, on a glorious late-summer Monday morning at RHS Wisley, and we're walking along the flower beds taking photos of the stupendous planting, tapping in the plant labels and looking up the varieties on the mobile internet. There's something to be said for this approach, as opposed to the old-fashioned notebook (which some here are still brandishing as a sort of outré gesture of faith towards outmoded techniques). In the words of a fellow visitor: "I've got the name of what it is and the image of what it looks like in the same place, so I can actually find it."