King Charles Plans New Garden for Royal Family's Beloved Country Home Where They Spend Christmas
Christopher Furlong/Getty Images King Charles and Queen Camilla at Sandringham recently
King Charles is working on the gardens of a beloved royal residence.
The British monarch, 74, is bringing a topiary garden to stand in front of Sandringham House in Norfolk, coming this spring.
Work to create the landmark garden has started on the West Lawn, which has been damaged by the weather and changing climate. In its place will be a topiary garden of 5,139 Yew tree hedging plants, which will stand alongside more than 4,280 herbaceous perennial plants and flowers, which will bloom from newly-planted yellow and pink rose varieties such as Gabriel Oak and Skylark.
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Radcliffe/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images Sandringham House
King Charles — whose gardens at another country home, Highgrove House, have been painstakingly designed and grown — likely hopes it will bring back something from his own childhood. The King recalled how he loved a similar garden when he was a boy. "There was the most wonderful topiary garden Queen Alexandra, my great-great-grandmother, had established," he said in 2019, according to The Times.
"I can still remember being taken as a child, being wheeled in my pram even, and it was so special, these clipped animal shapes, peacocks, birds, I've never forgotten it. I would say it had a profound influence on me."
Sandringham Estate Artist's impression of the new garden
The "topiary garden will include the introduction of new plants and flowers, a maze of new paths and the regrading and straightening of sloping banks," the Sandringham estate said in a statement.
With climate change and increasing rainfall, the estate managers found that the lawn had suffered in recent years. The new garden will introduce new species that are "more robust, hardy and better able to withstand the impact of emerging weather patterns," the estate adds.
The work is expected to finish in May.
Sandringham Estate
Charles inherited the home from his late Queen Elizabeth II, who died in September 2022. Sandringham House was the place that the late Queen would base herself from just before Christmas to just after the anniversary of the death of her father George VI on February 6th. Charles continued some of that tradition, celebrating Christmas with the royal family with the traditional walk to St. Mary Magdalene Church on Dec. 25 and basing himself there on the first weekends of the year — the first of his reign.
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Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty King Charles at Sandringham
The gardens around Sandringham House reopened to visitors for this week's school half-term holiday in England and will do so again over selected weekends in February and March. The main house and gardens are open for the main season from April 8 to October 12. It is closed on Fridays.
