What a weekend ahead ... but keep those wellies and the brolly on standby
Charles’s garden shapes up for visitors
‘Unsettled with showers and winds’
SPRING has finally sprung and a keen gardener’s fancy turns to... pruning.
None more so than at Highgrove, the King and Queen’s Gloucestershire country home.
Here a team of gardeners are carefully tidying up box and golden yew bushes, which have been clipped over many years into eccentric shapes including proud peacocks, majestic crowns and ornate spheres.
The work continued yesterday ahead of World Topiary Day tomorrow, which celebrates the horticultural artform of training and trimming bushes and trees into clearly defined shapes.
Visitors to Highgrove can enjoy an impressive avenue of hedges and topiary, which draws the eye towards the house and its terrace.
The gardens welcome tens of thousands of visitors between April and October every year.
Tours of the grounds help fund The King’s Foundation, a charity set up by King Charles to provide workshops and short courses in traditional skills and crafts.
The King has remarked that ‘one of my great joys is to see the pleasure that the garden can bring’. The 15 acres of land were little more than pasture when Charles acquired the estate in 1980.
Since then, the gardens have been created to ‘please the eye and sit in harmony with nature’.
In line with the King’s interest in sustainability, gardeners do not use insecticides and make their own compost.
AFTER a somewhat gloomy start to the year, the country was finally able to bask in some glorious sunshine this week.
But while most of the weekend looks very promising, it may soon be time pack away the garden furn iture, with thunderstorms threatening a dramatic end to the shortlived heatwave.
The warm spell, which began in midweek, is bringing the hottest weather of the year so far, with the mercury is set to reach as high as 26C (79F) today and 27C (81F) tomorrow.
in northern England, highs of 25C (77F) are possible on both days – though it is likely to be cooler nearer the coast.
Met Office spokesman simon Partridge said: ‘The warmest places are likely to be north west of London, such as parts of Oxfordshire.
‘The heat is likely to build over the weekend with the warmest temperatures on sunday.
‘ But thunderstorms due to arrive in the south West later in the day are then set to push the warm air out of the way. From Monday, we’ll see temperatures returning to what they should be for the time of year, the mid-teens Celsius, and it is due to turn more unsettled with areas of low pressure bringing showers and brisk winds.’ Yesterday, temperatures hit a maximum of 24.5C (76F) at Ross-on-Wye, herefordshire.
it was just short of the warmest temperature of the year so far, 24.6C ( 76.28F) recorded at st James’s Park, London on Thursday.
The warm weather comes with warnings of high pollen – which could affect Britain’s three million asthma sufferers – and high amounts of ultraviolet radiation.
it follows a dull April, when Britain averaged only 79 per cent of its normal sunshine levels. The month was also the sixth wettest April since records began in 1836.
A weather warning covering the western half of southern England, Wales, the Midlands and the North West has been issued for the thunderstorms during tomorrow afternoon and evening. Worstaffected areas could see up to 30mm (1.2in) of rain in an hour. Forecasters also warn that flash flooding may occur as rain quickly runs off land which has been baked hard by the heatwave.