Inside King Charles’ incredible home transformation – from run-down pile to breathtaking retreat
ok.co.ukWhen King Charles bought Highgrove House in 1980, it marked the beginning of a life-long passion project that not only tapped into his love of nature, but also provided him with a rural retreat away from the formality of London life.
Although he was already passionate about nature, Highgrove was where Charles’ love of gardening truly blossomed. “In some strange way, when I took on Highgrove, I knew what I wanted to do, even though I had absolutely no experience of gardening or farming and the only trees I had planted had been official ones in very official holes,” the King writes in Highgrove: Portrait Of An Estate.
He created a pioneering kitchen garden at the nine-bedroom Georgian property and with the help of the naturalist Dame Miriam Rothschild, planted a world-renowned wildflower meadow on its 347-acre Gloucestershire estate. “I knew I wanted to take care of the place in a very personal way and to leave it, one day, in a far better condition than I had found it,” he once said. “This was unlikely to be very difficult because everything was pretty dishevelled and run-down anyway!” A passion project for more than four decades, Charles has described Highgrove as “one very small attempt to heal the appalling short-sighted damage done to the soil, the landscape and our souls”.
At Highgrove, Charles also realised his dream of creating Home Farm – now one of the largest organic farms in the UK and the source of ingredients used in Duchy Originals products sold in Waitrose and around the world.
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