The Prince’s art

Agarden is a very personal space: its texture and colours tell us something about the owner, their history and personality, their taste and imagination. On a tour of Highgrove, published today in our magazine, Alex Preston describes the Prince of Wales’s garden as “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”. When he purchased the estate from the Macmillan family nearly 40 years ago, the Prince says it was very different: “No hedges; large open areas came right up to the house, with just a brown path that went round it.” He had to create “rooms”. The result is spectacular.

The Prince believes that everything in the ecosystem is interconnected, including man and nature. By implication, this imparts certain moral responsibilities: the gardener is a steward of the earth. When the Prince first started talking about organic agriculture in the Eighties, he was way ahead of his time – and just as the public is now conscious of how a lump of plastic can help destroy the oceans, so awareness is growing of the excessive use of chemicals. “The increasing loss of biological diversity,” he says, “terrifies me.”

His own family have clearly been listening – to his surprise, although it’s no wonder to anyone who has observed the Prince’s ability to win converts to his causes with gentle persuasion. He leads by example.

And what an example the garden is to the thousands who visit it every year. “I see it as an exhibition,” says the Prince. At Highgrove, it’s not just the garden that is on display but the soul of the gardener himself.