Duchess digs in for families
SHE has designed a garden for Chelsea Flower Show, trumpeted the benefits of getting children outdoors and has now set her own three loose on competitive sunflower-growing.
The Duchess of Cambridge this week turned her green-fingered talents on her local children’s hospice, planting a summer haven of strawberries, lavender and sensory herbs for families.
The Duchess, who last week shopped at her local garden centre for armfuls of plants, visited The Nook hospice, near her home at Anmer, Norfolk, to put the finishing touches to a newly-designed patio area and boost the spirits of children living at and visiting the hospice.
Paying tribute to the “resilience and bravery” of families facing serious illness, she told them she was “so blown away” by how they had coped in the past few months.
Giving each child a gift of sunflower seeds to plant, so they can watch them grow, she told them how Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis were doing the same at home.
“The children are really enjoying growing their sunflowers,” she said. “Louis’s is winning so George is a little grumpy about that!” The Duchess had launched the multi-million-pound East Anglia’s Children’s Hospices (Each) appeal to build the seven-bedroom Nook nearly six years ago, and returned in November for its official opening.
Since then, it has had to navigate caring for families through lockdown, with the garden particularly important for being directly accessible from children’s bedrooms.
Tracy Rennie, Each’s acting chief executive, said the Duchess had offered to create a new garden for the home to “bring people together”, choosing pots and plants in line with expert suggestions during her visit to Fakenham Garden Centre last week. Her shopping list included strawberries, sunflowers, lavender, thyme, rosemary, geraniums, hydrangeas, two large bay trees, rock hyssop, sage, chives and tarragon, which have now been planted at the Nook.
While there, she was seen pushing a trolley full of plants and making small talk with other customers, empathising with grandparents socially distancing from their grandchildren and disclosing she too has missed the Middleton family she is yet to see since lockdown.
When asked about her own family “three hours away in Berkshire”, she admitted: “I haven’t seen them and miss them.”
The Duchess got her hands dirty teaching Star Pope-Saunders, 11, her brothers Hudson, eight, and six-yearold Sonny how to loosen roots from the new pots to replant them.
She also fulfilled a promise to the Delf family, made during a video call last week, to plant a large sunflower in memory of nineyear-old Fraser who died in January this year at the Milton hospice in Cambridge. Meeting the Pope-Saunders family, who were visiting Each for the first time since Sonny was diagnosed with a brain tumour shortly after his sixth birthday in February, the Duchess said: “I’m always so blown away by families like yours, particularly having to go through all of this in lockdown. “You show such resilience and bravery. You’re such an inspiration to us all. More people in the country should meet families like you, there’s a huge amount of change for you all to take on and you have coped fantastically.”