SimplyAbuDhabi XXXVII

024 | SIMPLY INFLUENTIAL ‘I remember as a child at Sadringham, there was the most wonderful topiary garden Queen Alexandra, my great-great-grandmother, had established at the old dairy building. I can still remember being taken as a child, being wheeled in my pram even, and it was so special, these clipped animal shapes, peacocks, birds. I’ve never forgotten it. I would say it had a profound influence on me.’ The obsessions of our adult lives are shaped in childhood, and HRH The Prince of Wales spent his early days being led through a parade of glorious gardens, from Sandringham to Balmoral, from the historic private park attached to Buckingham Palace to the ornamental splendour of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s garden in Windsor Great Park. It’s no surprise that gardening has been the central passion of Prince Charles’s life, a passion that finds its ultimate expression in the garden he has established in the Gloucestershire countryside. The first thing you notice as you step into the grounds of Highgrove, near Tetbury, is the birdsong: a complex wash of wrens, thrushes and warblers. Then the colour: it’s early May, every gardener’s ‘golden hour’, and the place is at its most beautiful, with azaleas and rhododendrons in full flower, camassias and the last of the tulips dancing in the breeze, and all the greens of the architectural yew and hornbeam hedges bright with new growth. The gardens of country houses can feel formulaic, designed by committee, and yet Highgrove is something else - a place that is both 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. It’s also a garden that feels deeply personal, with every border, vegetable patch, topiarised hedge and ornamental flourish bearing the mark of its creator. SIMPLY INFLUENTIAL | 025 I’m shown around the 15 acres of Highgrove by head gardener Debs Goodenough, one of a team of 10, a likeable, self-effacing Canadian who, after an early life of high adventure - she was a coastguard and then a fire-watcher in the Rockies - turned to gardening. She was charged with restoring the gardens at Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s palatial holiday home on the Isle of Wight, and did so while adhering to strict organic principles. She has been at Highgrove since 2008 and is quiet, intensely knowledgeable and clearly devoted to her royal employer and his vision for this very special corner of Gloucestershire. Highgrove recently celebrated a quarter-century of the gardens being open to the public and 2020 marks the 40th anniversary of the Prince’s purchase of this Georgian manor house of Cotswold stone. From April to October 2019, around 40,000 visitors come on pre-booked, small- group tours of the garden, with all of the profits from these visits - £600,000 at the last count - going to the Prince’s various charitable endeavours. There’s something more than a merely philanthropic impulse at work here, though. ‘He’s always wanted to share it,’ Goodenough tells me. ‘People come here again and again. They collect the seasons.’ The Prince is very much a hands-on gardener, laying out new plants where he wants them, giving Goodenough extensive notes on his plans for the garden and then helping to put them into practice. ‘Whenever he’s been away, I can count the moments until he’s out here in his gardening clothes, looking to see what we’ve been up to,’ Goodenough tells me.