Charles On Home Soil Inside His Highgrove Hideaway

The Prince Tells Alex Preston How He’s Growing a Garden Legacy

"I remember as a child at Sandringham there was the most wonderful topiary garden Queen Alexandra, my great-great-grandmother, had established at the old dairy building,” Charles, Prince of Wales recalls. “It was so special, these clipped animal shapes, peacocks, birds. I’ve never forgotten it. I would say it had a profound influence on me.”

The obsessions of our adult lives are shaped in childhood, and the prince is no different, spending his early days being led through a parade of glorious gardens, from Sandringham to Balmoral, to the historic private park attached to Buckingham Palace to the ornamental splendour of the late Queen Mother’s garden in Windsor Great Park.

It’s no surprise that gardening has been a central passion of Charles’ life, a passion that finds its ultimate expression in the garden he has established in the Gloucestershire countryside.

The first thing you notice as you step into the grounds of Highgrove is the birdsong: a complex wash of wrens, thrushes and warblers.

Then the colour: it’s early May, every gardener’s ‘golden hour’, and the place is at its most beautiful − azaleas and rhododendrons are in full bloom, camassias and the last of the tulips dance in the breeze, and all the greens of the architectural yew and hornbeam hedges are bright with new growth.

The gardens of country houses can feel formulaic, but Highgrove is something else − a place that is both a work of exquisite, often eccentric art, and an advertisement for a way of thinking about our own relationship to the land we walk upon and cultivate.

It’s also a garden that feels deeply personal, with every border, vegetable patch, topiarised hedge and ornamental flourish bearing the mark of its creator.