Talking to plants is one of Charles’s LEAST potty ideas!
Giant Ali Baba pots. Leprechauns sitting in Greek temples. Sculptures of his favourite veg. How when it comes to his Highgrove garden...
IN OUR exclusive serialisation of a brilliant new biography of Prince Charles, we yesterday revealed the backstabbing, intrigue and treachery of the Prince’s toxic court. Here, in the fourth and final extract, SALLY BEDELL SMITH reveals Charles’s all-consuming obsession with his lavish and truly bizarre garden at Highgrove — and the despair of his wife, Diana, who would rather watch television . . .
From the moment he bought Highgrove House — with Camilla’s encouragement — in 1980, Charles set about pouring his ‘heart and soul’ into transforming its 25 acres of barren grounds. Diana, who married him the following year, took no interest in the project whatsoever, viewing the garden only as a convenient place to take walks.
‘If you bumped into her there, she had her head down and kept going,’ said head gardener David magson.
She mostly confined herself to her sitting room, watching television, reading magazines or lashing out at her personal staff.
Charles, for his part, left his young wife to her own devices and, as a beginner gardener, appealed to prominent friends and experts for guidance and tutorials. They readily offered their services for free, which Charles just as readily accepted.
His core team consisted of three ageing muses, the first of whom was 60-year-old mollie Salisbury, wife of the 6th marquess of Salisbury and the chatelaine of 17th century Hatfield House.
Tall and ethereal in her signature lace collars and long skirts, she was so formidable in her horticultural expertise and definite in her opinions that she was known as the ‘ high priestess of historic garden design’.
Guided by a sharp eye and unerring instincts, mollie took pride in being ‘completely untrained’. She taught Charles the principles of organic gardening and shared her natural fertiliser mixture of manure and leaf-mould, known as Salisbury Pudding.
With the best of intentions, she urged him to speak to his plants. Six years later, Charles admitted that not only did he talk to his plants, but ‘they respond, I find’. Indeed, he added, his fruits and vegetables were ‘a damned sight bigger because I instructed them to be’.
Through mollie, he met miriam rothschild, a member of the banking family. She was a self-taught naturalist, highly regarded by the scientific community for her rigorous studies of fleas and her wide-ranging knowledge of insects and plants.
miriam’s preoccupation with nature’s patterns and cycles made her a kindred spirit with Charles. At the age of 73, she wore billowing dresses and matching kerchiefs, and was always accompanied by a pack of collies. one commentator described her as ‘Beatrix Potter on amphetamines’.
Charles was her eager pupil, absorbing her instructions on sowing seeds to create a ragged meadow. Together, they planted bulbs among her own specially cultivated seeds to create ‘a drift of flowers’ that reminded him of the Botticelli painting, Primavera.
His third adoring muse was the renowned garden designer, rosemary Verey, then 62 and a close neighbour. She selected all the flowers and shrubs for an informal cottage garden behind Charles’s Georgian house. As well as being a very good teacher, she was also a motherly figure, and Charles enjoyed working at her side.