Highgrove

Highgrove is the King's own garden, made over more than forty years on the land around his house outside Tetbury. He bought the estate in 1980, when he was Prince of Wales, and committed it from the start to being entirely organic, at a time when that was thought eccentric rather than wise. The garden grew into one of the most admired in the country, a sequence of linked gardens worked by hand and planted to a private design.

The house is not open and never will be. The gardens are, through the summer months, by timed ticket and in small groups, and the shop on Tetbury high street sells what the estate and its chosen makers produce, the proceeds going to the King's charitable foundation.

It is a working expression of a long-held idea, that land should be kept well and patiently and handed on in better condition than it was found. The garden is the argument, made in box hedge and wildflower meadow.

It is also, in the end, a private house with its gate open a few weeks of the year. The county is full of them in the first part and empty of them in the second, and Highgrove is the rare one that lets you in at all.