King Charles’s garden in Highgrove starts to shape up for visitors as the summer months approach

Australia
By William

By Richard Marsden

Published: | Updated:

Spring has finally arrived and an avid gardener’s imagination turns to… pruning.

None more so than at Highgrove, the King and Queen’s country home in Gloucestershire.

Here, a team of gardeners are carefully clearing boxwood and golden yew bushes, which have been cut over the years into eccentric shapes, including proud peacocks, majestic crowns and graceful globes.

Work continued yesterday in the run-up to World Topiary Day tomorrow, which celebrates the horticultural art of training and pruning shrubs and trees into clearly defined shapes.

A team of gardeners carefully clear the box and yew bushes, which have been cut into eccentric shapes over the years, including proud peacocks

The King has commented that 'one of my greatest joys is to see what pleasure the garden can bring'

The King has commented that ‘one of my greatest joys is to see what pleasure the garden can bring’

The gardens have been landscaped to be 'a feast for the eyes and in harmony with nature'

The gardens have been landscaped to be ‘a feast for the eyes and in harmony with nature’

In line with the king's sustainability interests, gardeners do not use insecticides and make their own compost

In line with the king’s sustainability interests, gardeners do not use insecticides and make their own compost

Visitors to Highgrove can enjoy an impressive avenue of hedges and topiary, which draws the eye to the house and terrace. The gardens welcome tens of thousands of visitors every year between April and October.

Tours of the grounds help fund The King’s Foundation, a charity set up by King Charles to provide workshops and short courses in traditional skills and crafts.

The King has commented that ‘one of my greatest joys is to see the pleasure that the garden can bring’. The 15 hectares of land was little more than pasture when Charles acquired the property in 1980.

Since then, the gardens have been landscaped to ‘caress the eye and be in harmony with nature’.

In line with the king’s sustainability interests, gardeners do not use insecticides and make their own compost.

Let bloomer! Return of the carnation

Carnations are trendy again, thanks to a TikTok craze for removing the center petals.

The flowers once adorned the lapels of style icons such as Cary Grant, Sean Connery and Noel Coward. But recently they have been relegated to supermarket bouquets.

Now sales are soaring again as a wave of videos on the social media site give the ‘dated’ bloom a modern look by plucking the petals.

A florist who specializes in wedding flowers says: ‘I’m going to push it down to open it and take the center out. Now when I put this in a bouquet, it looks a little different.’

And a wedding planner said: ‘I always think they look so much more modern’.

Whitney Bromberg Hawkings, founder of online florist Flowerbx, said their carnation sales are up 715 percent year-on-year.

She said: ‘They turned out to be cool, interesting and bold floral choices.’

You might also like More from author