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.
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
told the architect: ‘I want to be as high as possible, so I can get up away from everyone, and I want a rope ladder which I can pull up so no one can get to me.’
The most dramatic view from the house was a long walkway, lined with big yews, that swept past rows of lime trees to a dovecote donated by the Sultan of Oman.
CharleS, inspired by the visions of Keith Critchlow, an expert in Islamic art and architecture who’d taught the prince what he called the sacred and timeless principles of geometry, had the yews clipped into Platonic and archimedean ‘solids’ — geometric forms that represented earth, water, fire and the universe.
Few visitors knew what the symbols meant. But the oddly configured bushes would become one of the garden’s most celebrated features.
another audacious idea that caught Charles’s fancy, dreamt up by two landscape architects, Julian and Isabel Bannerman, was a ‘stumpery’ — a modern variation of the Victorian practice of planting ferns among tree stumps. Work on this started in 1996, when a trailer arrived from the Scottish highlands carrying 40 tons of petrified wood. Shortly afterward, Charles took a delivery of giant roots from fallen sweet-chestnut trees.
‘When are you going to set fire to this lot?’ the Duke of edinburgh asked his son while touring the property one day.
The Stumpery took shape in a circular clearing. at opposite sides of it, Charles installed two Greek-style temples made of green oak, whose bases were filled with a tangle of driftwood that looked like deer’s antlers.
also in the clearing were undulating walls of interlocking tree roots that had been bent and twisted into an archway. and scattered about were mossy stumps and yet more upturned roots from which ferns had been encouraged to grow.
The fully enclosed stumpery was like an enchanted primeval glade, both spooky and mischievous. Charles even placed two ceramic leprechauns on an oak seat inside one of the temples. One wonders what Prince Philip made of it all — but The Stumpery became one of highgrove’s most popular features for visitors. above all, it reflected the prince’s proud eccentricity.
But the most peculiar, and inaccessible, garden feature was his own ‘sacred place’ — in effect, a monastery in miniature — to commemorate the millennium.
Gazing out from highgrove house, ‘he wanted to see it in a glade from his dressing room, he wanted to see it through the trees,’ said Charles Morris, the architect who designed and built what became known as The Sanctuary.
Morris had already successfully designed one of the rooms at highgrove. Not only did the architect’s traditional approach appeal to the prince, but Charles had hired him after he noticed Morris’s shoes had been mended, a sure sign he understood the value of preserving something well made.
‘he had seen the stitching along the soles,’ recalled Morris.
at Charles’s direction, Morris produced a design for The Sanctuary in the shape of a cross. he was also required to incorporate geometry
into the building, inspired by mathematical formulae in Epinomis — a book by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato.
Like The Stumpery, The Sanctuary had an otherworldly feel. It was built from local stone, timber and bricks made from Highgrove clay and chopped barley straw, with steeply pitched roofs, a mustard-coloured facade and four columns outside the front door.
Since the prince never carries keys, Morris made two special doorknobs that had to be manipulated in a special way to open the door. That way, only Charles and selected friends would ever be able to enter.
Inside, there were custom-made chairs from Orkney, reinforced by Morris to support Charles’s bad back. There was no electricity, just candles and a fireplace.
SMaLL stained-glass windows depicting Highgrove flowers and leaves were hand-blown and then dedicated to the late poet laureate, Ted Hughes, a friend of the prince and the Queen Mother.
and the barrel-vault ceiling was decorated with a bas-relief of two of Charles’s favourite vegetables: runner beans and swede.
The altar was a natural piece of rock cut into three layers. after staring at it for some time, Charles said to Morris: ‘If you look at it carefully, in the stone you can see the Holy Dove.’
There were also Greek Orthodox texts and Byzantine icons close at hand — all custom-made by a former hermit Charles had met while staying in monasteries on Mount athos in Greece. Soon after the temple’s completion, Richard Chartres, then Bishop of London, performed a consecration ceremony.
Charles considered The Sanctuary the place ‘where nobody can get me’ and tried to spend at least ten tranquil minutes alone there whenever he was in Gloucestershire. He sometimes stayed longer, writing by the open fire.
By the turn of the millennium, his 25-acre arcadia was fully organic, requiring a staff of 12 to keep it thriving. Charles was so proud of his efforts that he took to lying on the floor near the windows of his house to eavesdrop on the conversations of people taking tours.
The garden at Highgrove epitomised an inherent paradox. Charles, who yearned for harmony in his own life, and indeed for all of humankind, was creating a place quite opposite in its effect. ‘Interestingly enough,’ said Mollie Salisbury three decades after she helped shape its creation, ‘it is not harmonious. It is lots of bits and pieces. a hotch-potch.’
Yet the point of Highgrove, after all, was not coherence but passion — a fitting reflection of Charles’s own life.
Unshackled from the expectations of the outside world, freed from the regimentation of royal life, his garden was a place where his spirit could run a little wild. as he said of its creation himself: ‘I was driven by a sense of urgency. I felt like a man with a mission.’
ADAPTED from Prince Charles: The Passions And Paradoxes Of An Improbable Life by Sally Bedell Smith (Michael Joseph, £25) to be published on Thursday. © Sally Bedell Smith 2017. To buy a copy for £18.75 (offer valid until April 11, 2017), call 0844 571 0640 or order at mailbookshop.co.uk. P&P free on orders over £15.