Now keen organic gardener King Charles is in charge of the famous Buckingham Palace garden, everyone is waiting to see what he will do with the carefully designed and tended landscape.
A new book reveals that the garden design includes beehives, a bug-friendly water feature and even a dozen carefully selected ‘botanicals’ including mulberry bushes, lemon verbena, hawthorn berries and bay leaves grown especially to produce Buckingham Palace gin.
'I do wonder what His Royal Highness will make of the Buckingham Palace gardens,' says Chris Bonnett, founder and CEO of Gardening Express. 'Will he turn over some of the lawns into huge organic vegetable beds? Perhaps he could arrange a link up with inner-city schools to visit and tend the vegetables and for the children to learn about where food comes from and the importance of growing your own.'
Rose gardens at Buckingham Palace gardens
Royal inspiration
Fans of the Royalcore garden trend will find much to inspire in Buckingham Palace head gardener Mark Lane’s book, Buckingham Palace, A Royal Garden, available on Amazon, written in collaboration with gardening author Claire Masset and photographer John Campbell.
'The garden you see today looks nothing like it did in the 18th century, when it reached a peak of formality,' the book reveals. 'The then gardener, Henry Wise, added lots of finely executed features, including a canal, avenues of lime trees, elaborate parterres with fountains and statues, and paths lined with neatly-spaced tubs of bay and orange trees.'
The lake at Buckingham Palace gardens
Bee friendly
One of the two idyllic islands in the three-acre lake at Buckingham Palace has been home to five beehives since 2008, which produce around 160 jars of honey a year for use in the royal kitchens.
The gardens are already bursting with bee-friendly blooms, including the Buckingham Palace Rose Garden, with 25 rose beds, each boasting 60 rose bushes of a different variety, and a glorious herbaceous border more than 500 foot long.
Beehives in Buckingham Palace gardens
Welcoming waterfall
The eco-friendly garden is believed to host 350 species of wildflower, 83 species of birds and 2,500 British species of insects including butterflies.
The picturesque waterfall, a key element of the Romantic style of landscaping which has long influenced the garden’s design, helps to oxygenate the lake and attract all those birds and insects.
The waterfall in Buckingham Palace Gardens
Veteran British gardener, author and TV presenter Alan Titchmarsh, says it's already a wildlife garden haven: 'As you venture around the lake into the wildest places, you feel as though you’re deep in the country. I’m not the only one that’s fooled. Her Majesty made her garden a place where nature thrives.'
Only time will tell how Buckingham Palace Gardens will continue to evolve in the future under the new King.
Buckingham Palace opens for visitors several times a year, and tickets for 2023 will be available soon.
