And so another Chelsea Flower Show comes to an end.. The consensus is that more money has been invested in show gardens this year than ever before. Some designers have sunk over 1 million pounds into their exhibits, if the rumours are to be believed.

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I remember this time last year waiting expectantly with Roger, and even though I have been through it before it is no less nerve-wracking this year! We have won a Silver Gilt medal this year, which is a great achievement. We didn't quite hit gold this year; despite this I am extremely happy with the way the garden has come together and hope that the visitors to the show feel the same.

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Obviously disappointed not to have won a gold medal for the M&G Garden - particularly disappointed for Bunny who has sunk so much of her time and energy into its design and construction - but a silver gilt award is still quite an achievement. Apparently some of the judges considered the garden a little too cluttered - but the public and our clients have been delighted by it.

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Well, the show is well and truly underway now. Today saw the garden visited by a number of celebrities including Ringo Star, Vanessa Feltz and Christopher Biggins. A touch of glamour was brought to the garden by Jerry Hall and Zandra Rhodes, while Strictly Come Dancing star Brendan Cole and Pop Idol winner Will Young brought some colour. Take a look at our photo gallery to see if you can spot any other famous faces.

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Probably the most exciting day at the Chelsea Flower Show, as garden designers and their sponsors compete for the attention of the world's media. It is traditional for the exhibitors to stage a photo call to advertise their garden and this year was no exception.

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On Tuesday afternoon I made my first visit to the show ground this year - partly to gauge how the build of our garden is coming along, partly to check out the competition.

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On my visit to the Chelsea grounds last Friday I was amazed to see such a building site swarming with people in hard hats rushing around! The B&Q, Diarmund Gavin and Monaco Gardens, along with The M&G Garden, really are coming on a pace and the results, so far, look exciting.

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The glass finally goes in but not without hiccups!

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The build of 'The M&G Garden' on site at Chelsea is now in full swing! The biggest shock so far was how large the custom made pots were. Two pots stacked on top of each other were taller than Jacqui Haskins (M&G's Marketing Director)!!

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Suddenly the week we start on site at Chelsea is upon us, and I am desperately trying to cross off all my items on the ‘To Do’ list. Passes, booking lorries, checking with growers and cleaning up, along with getting out my old steel toe capped boots that we have to wear during build-up. I don't wear them often - they are full of cobwebs and spiders!

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As part of our Chelsea Flower Show promotional campaign we use London taxis to display our advertising. We've even got one sat in the M&G reception at the moment!! But don't worry some cabbie is not sitting twiddling his thumbs for the duration... this is one we made earlier!

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The first week on site is definitely the most daunting; there’s lots to do, lots to go wrong and we’re working to such a tight time frame to create a garden that would normally take a few years!

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The countdown has well and truly begun with the site opening for build on Monday 2 May. There really isn’t much time left – just under three weeks from access to the site to the Gala Preview evening.

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The team have been busy with advertising, literature, logistics etc, as well as responding to tweets. One such tweet (thanks lottielou1976!) has provided us with a great idea which we will launch soon on the microsite...

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The Marketing team are busy finalising the supporting documents to send out with tickets and for a few of us we will shortly be hiding away in a meeting room to collate all the tickets and information to hand over to the business areas to send out tickets.

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It’s the driest spring that Lincolnshire has ever encountered and Catalina, Deputy Editor from Sunday Telegraph, told me it was the same temperature in England as South Africa! Fantastic, but I am worried that my plants may get too far advanced and peak too soon.

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It’s under three weeks now before we start on site, and I’m busy checking progress on all the plants, especially the trees. We were filming a bit for the BBC and the cameraman (obviously a keen gardener) asked if I was worried about putting pleached lime trees around a glass structure. Lime trees are notorious for suffering from aphid attacks. They suck the sap and the sticky excreta shoots out of their back end, which slops onto the leaf or anything below.

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In search of PR inspiration, I ventured out on Saturday to Cardiff for the RHS's first show of the year. Blessed with unseasonably clement weather, the Cardiff event - a joint effort between the RHS and the City Council - has this year attracted more than 20,000 visitors over the course of its three days.

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I've just received some early morning shots of our herbs from Jekka - all flourishing thankfully. Most of the herbs are outside now so they will be strong plants, ideal for planting out at Chelsea. This is especially important as we are on an 'end of avenue' site at Chelsea which can be windy! They are being liquid fed weekly with ‘maxicrop’ which gives the plants a tonic but does not inhibit flowering or produce 'fast weak growth'. The Angelica are going to be whoppers!

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It’s been another busy week supporting the M&G team and business areas to get everything ready for show week, is it really a year since we were doing this for last year’s show?

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So, last week George, our Head of Design & Print, and I travelled to see the factory where our glass platform is being created. We were dropped off by the taxi in an industrial estate in the middle of no where – not a car, train or person in sight, quite unsettling really! Anyway, once inside it was quite a different experience.

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Busy week: Gardeners’ Question Time came to record a correspondence show from my garden, so a fair bit of sweeping and titivating went on – I didn’t want Bob Flowerdew or Chris Beardshaw spotting anything out of place!

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With less than two months until the show opens, we have started to kick around ideas for the press photo-call on the first day. This is one of many rituals at Chelsea. At a prescribed time on Monday morning before the show has opened up to the general public, the ladies and gentlemen of the photographic press are invited to snap away at the gardens.

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Thankfully the snow is just clearing in Aberdeen now, according to Helen Denerley. Helen is decorating a door for us that will form part of a wall in the M&G Garden. She has just finished creating a fantastic sculpture of her cow Daisy, which as you can see looks amazing, so now she is starting the door for the M&G Garden.

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A nail-biting week this week. Glass UK - which is manufacturing the massive 6m x 3.2m sheet of load-bearing glass that will form the sunny (hopefully) chill-out and viewing platform - did a trial run at their unit in Iver.

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I have been worried about the cold weather and looking at my paltry veg in my own garden, worrying whether we really are going to have beds stuffed full of lush, burgeoning veg and fruit at the end of May for The M&G Garden. Margaret Robinson of Robinson Seeds fame is growing most of them for us, and not only is she ‘Queen of Veg growing’, but I think she is also psychic!

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This week we have managed to sort out the training wire system that we are going to use to train the apples and pears to the walls. Deepdale Trees have found some nicely trained specimens in a double ‘U’ shape, which look great. Fixing wall plants against a vertical surface can be done in a myriad of different ways. My mother puts chicken wire on her house walls, which she swears by, you really don’t notice it’s there after the first couple of weeks. I think if I pulled out the chicken wire on a show garden it would cause a few of the judges to frown though!

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The willow arrived this week, a beautiful luminous green colour (Welsh New Kind) and a fawn brown (Dicky Meadows). Sue Kirk, who is a local expert, calculated the massive quantity, hired a van and brought it back from Musgroves Willow in Somerset. The dogs loved the smell of it and were leaping all over it in the van! Perhaps they thought the willow was going to be used to make a huge, bespoke, woven dog basket for them!

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As the Marketing Director at M&G for the past six years I can honestly say my job just gets better and better. I’m enjoying this project particularly, working with the lovely people at the RHS and steering the great team at M&G towards yet another spectacular (hopefully!) Chelsea Flower Show event. It’s handy that the people at the RHS are so great to work with as I’ve been meeting with them a lot lately. We’ve been discussing the finer points of the sponsorship programme, this year’s designers, garden ideas and how the RHS are getting on themselves.

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It’s been a busy week! We recorded for Gardeners' Question Time up at Alnwick gardens in Northumberland, very windy but a fabulous place – apparently they only had seven days of sunshine last summer, can that be true? I’ve tried hard to source some fresh globe artichokes for Brian Turner, the lead maker. He is making the artichoke finials to go on the balustrade posts.

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I have been busy chasing plants all week. Jekka’s Herb Farm is growing our herbs and I hadn’t realised I had inadvertently given the owner, Jekka, a hard time, and, what is worse, over Christmas! She had little heating oil left (for her house and polytunnels) and had rung her supplier to say she urgently needed some more before Christmas due to the intense cold spell.

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As RHS Chelsea Flower Show and The M&G Garden creation comes closer, I can not see why the ‘to do’ list is getting longer rather than shorter! On Tuesday we set off to visit some of our makers and suppliers in Norfolk and Suffolk. First off, at 8.30am we popped into the Romantic Nursery where John Powles had just planted a couple of sweeping shaped containers with box hedging to flank the steps to the top area in the garden . They are under glass and he reckons he will cut these four times before the show so we have really dense even growth.

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Well here I am in my second year of managing the overall sponsorship programme for M&G (and the RHS Chelsea Flower Show sponsorship specifically) and I’m blogging and tweeting! It’s all been very busy so far, from interviewing all of the possible garden designers to create The M&G Garden and eventually appointing Bunny Guinness (who turned up with a fantastic concept) to our big day out filming with Bunny visiting the cottage industries of Norfolk and Suffolk!

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