A glorious tour of the gardens of our green-fingered King
‘Come on, keep up,” said a game Zoe Ball through the radio, leading the way briskly through the gardens at Highgrove, the private residence of the King and Queen. The King’s Garden (Sunday, Radio 2) was a behind-the-scenes tour, interviewing people who work there and a few famous friends of the garden and of the King – notably, Monty Don and Pam Ayres – who love to visit.
Radio in the run-up to the Coronation is turning out to be more insightful than the TV equivalent. Maybe it’s because there’s no temptation to churn out overused visual footage of mink and ermine and jewels as filler. As a result, there’s more room for voices, and more voices mean more opinion, reflection, and analysis, as well as celebration. That feels important, in the context of a major national constitutional moment.
Celebration is important too, though. The King has already put the natural world at the centre of his Coronation ceremony by commissioning invitations wreathed in flowers, leaves, wildlife and the Green Man. Ball helped to bring his organic garden to life through the radio by effusing over the warmth of the spring sun in the sheltered walled garden. In the kitchen garden, organic produce is grown for the King’s plate,
and then we were off through the atmospheric stumpery, humming with insects and birds, the romantic Thyme Walk, the expansive wildflower meadow, and finally to the cottage garden. Ball marvelled at the grand, moss-covered fountain, with a willow ramp below it to help wildlife clamber in and out of the water.
The King didn’t take part personally, though you can imagine he must have been pleased by it as a tribute to natural conservation, the organic movement, and the preservation of traditional crafts. The staff at Highgrove discussed lovingly the King’s principles and how they’re enacted there, and how, when the King is in residence, they might come into work to find “piles of prunings” he’d done himself. The King is also, they reported, a keen hedgelayer.
The beauty of this being radio is that you don’t see any roped-off areas or paths you’re not allowed to go down. The garden stretches on forever, idyllically, in the mind. Where Ball brought the enthusiasm, Don’s contributions to the programme were more philosophical, as he praised how the King championed organic principles long before they were fashionable, and cited him as a source of popular inspiration, suggesting that, “in our gardens, in our little mini palaces, we can do the same” as Highgrove. Organic asparagus all round, then?
Radio 4 has been preparing for the Coronation with a more closely analytical eye. In the fascinating Archive on 4: Charles – the Making of a King (Saturday, Radio 4), Sarah Montague put together the story of Charles’s life so far through archive recordings and interviews with the King’s friends and peers, including Nicholas Soames and Richard Chartres, Charles’s friend at Cambridge and the former Bishop of London.
Montague struck a sensitive balance between the acknowledgement of the King’s public service, charitable work and personal interests as the Prince of Wales, and the heavy weight of the constitutional role he has long been anticipating, set alongside the very human ups and downs of his life.
It was refreshing and illuminating to hear an account of those famous hard times – notably the King’s first marriage to Diana Spencer and the unhappiness of its breakdown, followed by her tragic death – explored within the context of his life as a whole. This programme was not just an advertisement for monarchy, but a story, and any story needs to admit moments of failure and adversity to give meaning to the times of success and accomplishment. Montague, with producer Sandra Kanthal, deftly achieved this.
I’ll tell you what else is a good story, and that’s the story of perhaps the most significant heist in Scottish history: the removal of the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey to Scotland in 1950 by four Glasgow University students. In Stone of Destiny (Monday, Radio 4), the Scottish poet, Tiktok superstar and Scots language advocate, Len Pennie, related how it was covertly taken from London to Scotland on Christmas Day, alongside a nimble history of the stone’s use in the crowning of Scottish kings, and an evaluation of its symbolic importance to Scots through history and to people across Britain today. Pennie, who is just 24, gave her account of a sometimes controversial topic with clarity, confidence, authority, and articulate verve, a perfect blend of the past and the contemporary.