King Charles’s backyard in Highgrove begins to form up for guests

On May 11, 2024

Published: 02:11, 11 May 2024 | Updated: 02:11, 11 May 2024

Spring has finally sprung and a keen gardener’s fancy turns to… pruning.

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

Here a team of gardeners are carefully tidying up box and golden yew bushes, which have been clipped over many years into eccentric shapes including proud peacocks, majestic crowns and ornate spheres.

The work continued yesterday ahead of World Topiary Day tomorrow, which celebrates the horticultural artform of training and trimming bushes and trees into clearly defined shapes.

A team of gardeners are carefully tidying up box and golden yew bushes, which have been clipped over many years into eccentric shapes including proud peacocks

The King has remarked that ‘one of my great joys is to see the pleasure that the garden can bring’

The gardens have been created to ‘please the eye and sit in harmony with nature’

In line with the King’s interest in sustainability, 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 towards the house and its terrace.The gardens welcome tens of thousands of visitors between April and October every year.

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 remarked that ‘one of my great joys is to see the pleasure that the garden can bring’. The 15 acres of land were little more than pasture when Charles acquired the estate in 1980.

Since then, the gardens have been created to ‘please the eye and sit in harmony with nature’.

In line with the King’s interest in sustainability, gardeners do not use insecticides and make their own compost.

Late bloomer! Return of the carnation

Carnations are trendy again, thanks to a TikTok craze for removing their centre petals.

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

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

One florist specialising in bridal flowers says: ‘I’m going to push it down to open and take the middle out. Now when I put this in a bouquet, it is going to look a little different.’

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

Whitney Bromberg Hawkings, founder of online florist Flowerbx, said their sales of carnations are up 715 per cent year-on-year.

She said: ‘They’ve become a cool, interesting, bold flower choice.’