You do not have to be an avid fan of the Arts and Crafts movement to subscribe to William Morris’s dictum about having ‘nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’. The same sentiment can be readily applied to a garden, and nowhere is this more evident than in King Charles’s kitchen garden at Highgrove, his private residence in Gloucestershire. His Majesty’s long-standing commitment to all things green and organic is of course well known – much of his time as Prince of Wales was spent promoting the virtues of organic gardening and environmental sustainability – and, as anyone who has had the pleasure of visiting Highgrove gardens will testify, it is a commitment borne out of his home turf.
Every keen gardener fantasies about owning an enclosed kitchen garden, within whose sheltering walls grow fruit and vegetables, herbs and flowers to fill the house with beauty and furnish the table with fresh produce. And, if that kitchen garden can be beautiful as well as useful, the result is something of a sanctuary that feeds the soul as well as the body. Highgrove’s is the stuff that dreams are made on, but it was not always so. When the Prince of Wales, as he then was, bought the property in 1980 it was, he says, ‘in a rather dissolute state, with its weather-beaten 18th-century brick walls glowing in the afternoon sun. I instantly began to see the possibilities for creating something that had been in the back of my mind for several years a walled garden containing flowers, fruit and vegetables and clipped box hedges.’
Walled gardens are eminently practical: they offer protection from rabbits, shelter from wind and, on walls facing south and west, the ability to grow trained fruit trees that crop ahead of those on open ground. At just under two-thirds of an acre, this one is of relatively modest size compared with those of grander estates and, despite its dilapidated condition, the King says that at the time his aspirations were ‘madly ambitious - a kind of miniature Villandry’. He admits, however, that I soon found I had to moderate such ambitions in the interests of practicality and economy’. The result is a robust yet enchanting garden with formal divisions laid out to represent, as Bunny Guinness points out in the book HRH The Prince of Wales: Highgrove – A Garden Celebrated, the cross of St George and the triangles of the cross of St Andrew.
It’s hard to believe that before the King moved here the area was given over to pigs and that all it contained when he arrived was an old ‘dunking pool’ and a collection of ancient fruit trees. As handy for filling watering cans today as it was a century or more ago, it is a pool still, but now a more formal structure with a moss-encrusted fountain in the centre over whose rim water trickles – a source of sustenance for bees and wasps in summer (the owner is a naturalist as well as a gardener). Low hedges edge the formal beds of salad crops and asparagus, brassicas, onions and potatoes, beans and peas, carrots and parsnips, though much of the original box has had to be replaced by alternative species thanks to the depredations of box blight and, more recently, box moth. Fruit trees add height, as do wide tunnels made from iron hoops over paths. These are furnished with espalier apples that create a tunnel of blossom in spring and are laden with a bounty of fruits in autumn.
The feeling in this sequestered place is of natural fecundity coupled with a sense of calm and contentment. Gardens are about atmosphere as much as spectacle and the Highgrove kitchen garden is blessed with both. I have visited on countless occasions and at different times of year. There is no doubt that spring and summer are when it is at its best, but even in winter the structure offered by the skeletal fruit trees, the hooped arches and the formal pattern of paths and evergreen hedges provides a clean-limbed kind of solace and a promise of good things to come. As kitchen gardens go, I know of none better.
Highgrove Gardens offers 90-minute guided tours until September, with ticket sales supporting the work of The Prince’s Foundation. Details: highgrovegardens.com
A version of this article appears in the May 2023 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
