MisunderstoodTHE Prince
RoSemAry then introduced him to Sir roy Strong, the 46year-old director of the Victoria and Albert museum, who was known for his flair with topiary. At Charles’s behest, Strong cut Gothic ‘ windows’ into the yew hedges near the house to allow glimpses of distant hay fields.
It was the first of many offbeat touches as Charles extended the garden into a collection of eclectic ‘rooms’ and distinctive features.
rather than relying on a master plan, Charles shaped his garden haphazardly. He walked endlessly around his property for inspiration, consulted books and visited other famous gardens.
He scrawled long, weekly memos in red pen to his head gardener, filled with underlinings and exclamation points.
When he supervised the planting of trees, he shouted instructions from the front doorstep through a megaphone so that each sapling was positioned to the best advantage for future growth.
of prime importance, starting in the late eighties, was converting the garden and his nearby 1,000acre Home Farm from conventional to organic cultivation.
Charles’s plan was to ‘put the soul back’ into agriculture — because he found ‘industrial- scale’ farming techniques ‘deeply depressing’ and at odds with the natural world.
He vowed to restore the ‘ancient pastures’ and rebuild the hedges and stone walls that had been ripped out. He brought in rare breeds of livestock and encouraged his farmhands to use heavy horses and scythes. He learned the ancient art of hedge-laying, which became another hobby. From october until march, he spent hours at Home Farm, constructing hedges and cutting errant branches with axes and handsaws.
The prince was determined to eliminate artificial fertilisers and pesticides. The new regime required that the land be rotated over a three-year period from cash crops such as wheat and oats to fallow cultivation with clover and grass that would allow the soil to replenish its nutrients. In the third year, the land would be grazed with cattle and sheep, ploughed and seeded anew.
Although Charles hoped other farmers would follow his lead, very few could afford to do so without going bankrupt, not least because his techniques were so labour-intensive.
When a group of gentlemen farmers took a tour of his farm one day, one of them asked why a wheat field was completely free of weeds.
‘I was told they were removed mechanically,’ he recalled. ‘What this meant was having flat-bed trucks on which field workers would lie down to pick the weeds as the truck slowly advanced. It was not a technique that could translate into large-scale farming.’
The prince hoped that, at the very least, his model practices would be adopted by the 130 tenants who farmed his Duchy of Cornwall land. But to his disappointment, even they found it impossible to emulate his idealistic — and very expensive — farming methods.
‘ We cannot dictate to them,’ admitted Sir Bertie ross, who ran the Duchy’s day-to-day operations. ‘ They are running their farms as businesses.’
meanwhile, in the gardens, Charles continued to add idiosyncratic embellishments: enormous Ali Baba pots; sculptures of various friends and mentors; and cut- outs in the hedge around a sundial garden that featured busts of the prince himself.
For his children, he commissioned an architect to create a thatchedroof treehouse on top of a holly tree and christened it Hollyrood House. Prince William, then seven, was consulted — and poignantly