SimplyAbuDhabi XXXVII

028 | SIMPLY INFLUENTIAL SIMPLY INFLUENTIAL | 029 When it came to the gardens at Highgrove, the Prince sought the advice of two notable garden designers - Lady Salisbury and Rosemary Verey. ‘Certainly I had great help from Mollie Salisbury, of whom I was very fond and thought it was rather marvellous how she had made her gardens at Hatfield and at Cranborne House in Dorset. Rosemary Verey, who lived down the road, was a great help with selecting plants for the cottage garden.’ The principal challenge at first, he said, was the question of how to frame the house’s neo-classical façade. It is now clad in creeping ivy and swags of exquisitely scented wisteria - the Prince, Goodenough tells me, leaves the windows open as often as he can when the wisteria is in bloom. At the front of the house are evergreen oaks topiarised into the shape of umbrellas, while around it are planted rhododendrons and yellow azaleas, and a host of other scented shrubs and herbs - lavender, rosemary, choisya and curry plants. From each aspect of the house, there is the interplay of close-in details with distant views, the eye constantly being drawn along paths of interest. It could be the Thyme Walk leading down through ornate golden yew to the bronze Borghese gladiator given to the Prince by his friend the film-maker Lord Cholmondeley; or the pleached hornbeams whose regulated formality clashes pleasingly with areas of lawn left to go wild; or the high crowns of the arboretum with bursts of colour shining up from underplanted rhododendrons. ‘With the garden here,’ the Prince told me, ‘I felt that because the area is so flat, you had to try and create vistas, so I’ve tried to create them from each part of the house, so there’s always something to catch the eye in the distance. It seems to me that half the secrets you pick up when you visit a great garden are these important details. If the landscape around the house had been undulating it would have been quite different.’ To the southern side of the house is a formal box parterre surrounded by topiarised yew, originally planned by Lady Salisbury as a rose garden, but now known as the Sundial Garden. Around the sundial at the centre are box beds with Royal Star magnolia trees planted inside, their last flowers just dimming. Camassias are one of the garden’s signature spring sights, and the tall violet spires provide a link between the decorum of the parterre and the wildness of the Meadow Walk beyond, which is viewed through high wrought- iron gates and leads between an avenue of hornbeam towards a stand of acers. The combination of the dark yew hedges, the vibrant green of the hornbeam, the camassias and the wine- dark leaves of the acers is breathtaking. It’s this experimentation with colour that is one of the Prince’s great pleasures in the garden. ‘The things I’ve learnt from various wonderful artists over the years have been hugely helpful, particularly when it comes to colour. I love the business of colour combination. You came down here and saw the garden when the camassias were out - what I’ve tried to do as you look from the house towards the Kitchen Garden is to mix the camassias with the combination of those copper-coloured acers which run along either side of the Meadow Walk.’ When Prince Charles bought Highgrove, there was a venerable 200-year-old cedar of Lebanon at the west-facing rear of the house. It was 60ft high and overhung the terrace, providing a link between the house and the garden. Cedars are dying out all over the country just now. While they reach great ages in the Levantine mountains from which they originate, their lifespan in the UK appears to be 200 to 300 years - most of the country’s great cedars were planted in Georgian and early Victorian times. It slowly became clear that Highgrove’s cedar was dying. ‘The old cedar tree by the house had a unique character of its own and somehow framed the house beautifully. It meant a great deal to me and I began to worry about the gap it would leave if I lost it, so I planted a new one over 30 years ago to take its place in the future. The maddening thing was that I couldn’t plant the new one in the same place, because I’d already put in the pleached hornbeams. So I had to put it further away. And it doesn’t now frame the house in the way the old one did. So you can imagine it was a real agonising moment when to my horror it gradually died, these awful fungi appeared and began eating it up.’ On the site of the old cedar, the Prince commissioned an oak pavilion, designed by Mark Hoare, an ecological architect who studied at the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. I love the business of colour combination.” “