THE DUCHESS OF CORNWALL
ON HER PASSION FOR PLANTS AND THE POWER OF GARDENING TO SOW THE SEEDS OF A HEALTHIER LIFE
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her husband the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall has green fingers and so was thrilled to be welcomed by Gardeners’ World presenter Monty Don into his private garden of delights in Herefordshire.
Dressed in a bold jungle-print dress by Fiona Clare, Camilla was shown around Longmeadow and its famous Jewel Garden – which the TV horticultural enthusiast has nurtured for three decades with his wife Sarah – to film an episode of the long-running BBC2 show.
The 74- year- old Duchess happily wandered around the foxgloves, poppies and roses, grown in cottage-garden style with vegetables and fruit trees, discussing how gardens can have a healing effect on our health and wellbeing.
“I think gardens got people through Covid,” she said. “They realised how special a garden was and what they could do with it. They could become inventive, even if they hadn’t before. They could start growing vegetables.
“It was a sort of spiritual experience for them,” she added. “They discovered a sort of affinity with the soil. You can go into a garden and you can completely lose yourself. You don’t have to think about anything else: you’re surrounded by nature, you’ve got birds singing, you’ve got bees buzzing about – there is something very healing about gardens.”
Camilla, of course, has her own beautiful gardens at Highgrove House, the country home she shares with Prince Charles, which attracts thousands of visitors a year. She often posts photos of its stunning plants and flowers on her Instagram account, The Reading Room.
GROWING PAINS
“I’ve got a little bit of a woodland garden that I’ve started and I would love to build that up more,” she told Monty. “I would love to put down swathes of bulbs and I would also like to have a proper wildflower meadow.
“At the moment, I’ve got a bit, but the grass has taken over and we’re going to have another go this year of planting more seeds because, I think, especially now, it’s ever more important to have these wildflowers if we’re going to keep on attracting butterflies and bees. I think that’s very important.”
The Duchess’s love and knowledge of gardening was passed on to her by her mother Rosalind Shand – which Camilla discussed in a video filmed at Highgrove and posted on Instagram.
“I remember the first house I had, looking at this garden and actually then saying to my mother: ‘Help!’ You know – where do I go from there? And she came and sort of talked me through a lot of the basics,” she said. “She taught me how to prune, she taught me how to plant, she taught me how to weed.”