The Woman Who Helped King Charles III Shape His Beloved Highgrove Gardens
The annual visit by Charles to the Chelsea Flower Show last week recalls a revealing conversation with the late Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury, the "high priestess" of gardening
As I flipped through the photographs of King Charles at the Chelsea Flower Show last week, I could see how happy he was to be surrounded by greenery and colorful floral displays. Only days earlier, he had been named the patron of the Royal Horticultural Society, which runs the show in London each May. His mother, Queen Elizabeth II, had been the society’s patron for seven decades until her death in 2022. This year’s show had over five hundred exhibitors along with thirty-five featured gardens.
“It was a clever move”
Charles had reason to be upbeat. This was the first time the King’s Highgrove Gardens shop had an exhibit at Chelsea, showcasing its products and demonstrating traditional crafts and sustainable floristry. Three years ago, the Highgrove Gardens were put under the aegis of the Prince’s Foundation (now the King’s Foundation). “It was a clever move,” one of Charles’s advisers told me, “because the garden tours make a lot of money, and he wanted to keep that revenue in the foundation as a way of generating money for other projects.” Some 40,000 people visit the Highgrove Gardens each year, and in the thirty years since the tours began, they have raised more than $8 million for Charles’s charitable causes.
Much has been written about the imaginative and eclectic gardens at Highgrove, the Gloucestershire estate bought for Charles in June 1980 by the Duchy of Cornwall. As Prince of Wales, he was also the Duke of Cornwall, the beneficiary of the Duchy’s vast portfolio of properties throughout England. I covered the Highgrove Gardens extensively in my biography, Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life. When a group of schoolchildren responsible for a “No Adults Allowed” garden at Chelsea proclaimed him the “King of Compost,” I was reminded of his primary gardening tutor, the Marchioness of Salisbury. She was an organic gardening pioneer who explained to me the origins of the Highgrove Gardens when she was ninety years old and impressively sharp.
In 1980, thirty-one-year-old Charles was, by his own admission, an inexperienced gardener, although he had loved gardens since his boyhood. Like his mother, he had cultivated a small garden patch as a child, but there the practice of gardening ended for both of them. Queen Elizabeth II neither had the time nor inclination to become a passionate gardener during her seventy-year reign. She appreciated beautiful gardens, though, and even in her nineties frequented the winding paths in the late eighteenth-century romantic gardens at Frogmore House near Windsor Castle.
“The greatest influence”
Debs Goodenough, the head gardener at Highgrove for a dozen years, told me that the “greatest influence” on Charles was Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, “from color and scents and the plants she used.” Both his grandparents, in fact, had been avid gardeners since their thirties when they first moved into Royal Lodge, their home near Windsor Castle. The future Queen Elizabeth created mixed herbaceous borders and planted hedges of lavender and rosemary near the house to carry fragrance through open windows. The future King George VI developed an expertise in landscape design and became an authority on rhododendrons.
The “green goddess”
In the summer of 1980, Highgrove House—which dated from the late eighteenth century— was surrounded by twenty-five acres of flat land, stumpy shrubs, moribund flower beds, and one distinctive tree, a two-hundred-year-old Cedar of Lebanon. Charles immediately sought out sixty-year-old Marjorie “Mollie” Salisbury, whose restorations of the gardens in the Salisbury estates at Hatfield and Cranborne Manor he had long admired. He wanted to tap the “taste and consummate skill” of the elegant woman known alternately as the “green goddess” and the “high priestess” of garden design.
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