SimplyAbuDhabi XXXVII

But of all Highgrove’s many treasures, the Stumpery is the most memorable. There’s something truly magical about the place, as if you’re stepping into a mossy cave, green light filtering down on to ferns and hostas, the stumps arranged in gnarled, sculptural knots. It feels pagan, ancient, as if Pan or the Green Man might spring out from behind one of the stumps (instead, we come upon a garden gnome hidden in a moss-grown declivity). At the heart of the one-and-a-half-acre Stumpery stand two classical temples, their pediments inlaid with loch driftwood. At first they appear to be made of stone, but when you look closer, you see they’re hewn from green oak. David Wynne’s sculpture of the Goddess of the Woods crouches outside one of them - the guardian spirit of this enchanted place. It’s like something out of a children’s story, and it’s no surprise that Prince William’s thatched treehouse - known jokingly as Holyrood House - was resituated here when the tree it was in died. I asked the Prince if it was his memories of gardening as a child with his grandmother that informed the whimsical, fantastical nature of the Stumpery - it was the late Queen Elizabeth who helped him lay out the planting and this is where her memorial stands. ‘Children respond to timelessly intriguing things like small, hidden paths which you never quite know where they’re leading. Or little tunnels and little places that make it exciting and interesting. That’s what I love. And the Stumpery has been a bit like that. I could have made it even more interesting and rather bigger if I’d had a chance. I had these wonderful, talented and imaginative friends, Julian and Isabel Bannerman, whose design the Stumpery was.’ The Bannermans are two of the country’s most sought-after garden designers, best-known for their work on the garden at Asthall Manor, the Mitfords’ former home in Oxfordshire. 030 | SIMPLY INFLUENTIAL SIMPLY INFLUENTIAL | 031 Highgrove and the 900-acre Duchy Estate are run on strictly organic terms. ‘The Prince’s environmentalism is central to what we do here,’ Goodenough tells me. ‘We work in harmony with the soil and the seasons. The Prince is wholly against the quick-fix approach to gardening, the use of chemicals.’ When the Prince championed organic horticulture with the founding of Duchy Originals in 1982, he was regarded as something of an oddball, pressing ahead with a form of gardening and agriculture that felt nostalgic and impractical, counter to the forward-looking spirit of the age. Since then, the organic movement has gained extraordinary momentum, with recent studies on the biodiversity of the British countryside revealing the astonishing damage wrought by chemically intensive industrial agriculture. I asked the Prince if he feels vindicated by the now widespread acceptance of organic methods of gardening and agriculture? ‘Not exactly vindicated,’ he replied. ‘If change is happening, it’s happening very slowly - too slowly - and it’s coming too late. This is what frightens me. The increasing loss of biological diversity terrifies me, and the fact that we seem to have forgotten that everything in nature is interconnected, including ourselves. Unfortunately, the destruction is continuing at a rapid pace - chemicals of every description, artificial fertilisers and antibiotics are still being used in all kinds of ways, all of them entering the rivers and going out to sea where they’re causing untold damage to the marine environment, often without people knowing it. To a certain extent much of this can be rescued, but the really difficult thing is to persuade people that there’s an alternative way of doing it, as there is for plastics. But of course it’s very tempting to resort to a can of this or a can of that when you have a particular problem.’