How Does Your Garden Grow?

The gardens on exhibit at London's trend-setting Chelsea Flower Show aren't just a haven of beauty and tranquility in a hectic world.

World-famous lifestyle guru and restaurateur Sir Terence Conran's rooftop garden is an extension of his kitchen -- a high-tech vegetable garden. The ultimate consumer's garden: One he can eat.

Conran says, "We spend our days looking into television screens at work. Most people come home and look into television screens when they get home. People like to come home and look at the greens when they get home. This is a real release from the technology of the modern life."

In fact gardening (long the passion of the green-thumbed British) has produced a strain of pop star. She's Charlie Dimmock, whose regular appearance on a popular instant garden makeover TV show in London has plucked her from the obscurity of a regional garden center and turned her into a national figure.

"When you work hard, when you finish, you think, 'Wow, I've done a good job - I've done all that work,'" she says.

Is this feel-good gardening and feel good fast? Gardens off the shelf for the generation that may not know its clematis from its chrysanthemums?

"The people who are in their 40s or whatever now are still young, they've got to make it funky," explains The Times columnist Nigella Lawson. "Hey, gardening is new and happening, because they don't want to say, 'I'm settling down, and I want to do a bit of gardening,' because that was just being like their parents were."

The Chelsea Flower Show may be less about flowers than it is about the blossoming end of the millennium lifestyle. You've done the house, the kids, the cars, so the garden is the final frontier.

It's also a hobby that can say a lot about you; not just that you have the aesthetic taste to want a garden, but that you have the time to devote to one.

The garden as personal statement. The garden as passion. But, in the end, the garden as what it was always meant to be: A place of refuge.