A Martian allotment has pipped a hotly tipped Swedish garden to first place at the Chelsea Flower Show.

Royal Horticultural Society judges caused consternation when they plumped for a garden designed to keep an astronaut happy during a stay on Mars.

The winner of the Best in Show award and an RHS gold medal was created after eight years of research into the type of garden that could be grown on the Red Planet.

The garden, officially called '600 Days with Bradstone' but more popularly referred to as 'Life on Mars', has medicinal and nutritional plants, with a handful of flowers to provide colour, but contains a large proportion of packed earth, concrete and stone.

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The concrete and rock garden, created by Sarah Eberle, was described as "brave" by other show garden designers but it was regarded as an unlikely winner because it lacked in obvious aesthetic appeal.

Bob Sweet, the show's organiser, said that "without a doubt" some of the designers would be spitting tacks at the decision and the failure of others to win a gold medal.

He said there were other contenders for the top award but to have chosen any other show garden would have been have gone for the soft option.

"What they recognised overall was really how brave it was to design a garden for Mars and to pull it off. It captures everyone's imagination," he said.

Ulf Nordfjell, the Swedish designer of the 'A Tribute to Linnaeus', had been the hot favourite to win and appeared shellshocked after learning his garden had been beaten by the Martian landscape.

His garden, representative of spring in Sweden, was built to mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus who devised the Latin name system still used today to identify plants and animals.

A second display devoted to Linnaeus, that of the Linnean Society of London which next week welcomes Emperor Akihito of Japan to give the anniversary speech, won a silver-gilt medal in the lifelong learning category at Chelsea.

Ms Eberle created the Martian garden in conjunction with the European Space Agency and the Science Museum in London which advised her on what could grow on Mars and what astronauts might need.

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