I was outside the gates of Highgrove House when the unmarked police car pulled up behind me. It was shortly before 9am on a chilly Sunday morning in July. A sign affixed to the high grey stone wall warned that trespass on the estate, near Tetbury in Gloucestershire, owned by the Duchy of Cornwall and rented for the foreseeable future by His Majesty the King, was a criminal offence. Trespass was not my intention, although I was vaguely aware that journalists – most of them enterprising Frenchmen – have been banged up for getting too close to the house before.
The police officer, a balding, hulking man in official black with a danger-yellow taser velcroed to him, asked me what I was doing. I had been waiting by the gate for a few minutes, and couldn’t see the camera that had obviously seen me. I told the officer I was here for the “Harmony in Nature Wellness Day” that I had blown £180 on. I hoped it might help me understand our monarch, who is poorly understood at the best of times. The officer said I was at the wrong gate. The entrance to the “Wellness Day” was 600 yards up the road. He added, somewhat apologetically, that he couldn’t give me a lift because there was a real weapon in his car.
The then Prince of Wales purchased Highgrove House through the Duchy of Cornwall 45 years ago. Before Charles, the house had been owned by Maurice Macmillan, son of the former prime minister Harold, who was, according to one historian, “indifferently fond of gardening”. Charles, it must be said, is not indifferently fond of gardening. Over the decades, while he patiently waited for his mother to die, he dug a miniature botanical universe on the ill-used acres around Highgrove. With the help of a marchioness, a Rothschild, huge sums of money and some of Britain’s smartest garden designers, he created the clearest statement of his beliefs out of branches and petals. Simultaneously his solace and his redemption, the garden, he once said, was “the outward expression of my inner self”. For his Herculean efforts, Charles was awarded a modest label by television’s Alan Titchmarsh in a documentary 15 years ago: “The best royal gardener in history.”
The ulterior purpose of Highgrove is mentioned less often and was perhaps unknown, even to Titchmarsh. The prince, as he then was, wanted a residence of his own to “convene” the great power players and personalities of his future kingdom. Few have been able to resist a private lunch with Charles at Highgrove, according to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby. A list of the government ministers who have been Jaguared to the house and the minutes of their discussions with Charles would make a revealing alternative history of the official British mind between 1981 and 2021. Recent years have brought changes, though; privacy and powerbrokering have given way to something much more public. In July 2021, ahead of the Queen’s death, Charles signed a deal with the Duchy of Cornwall to rent Highgrove from William, the future Prince of Wales. The gardens, house and swimming pool – the last a wedding gift from the British Army for Charles’s doomed marriage to Diana Spencer – would remain under his control. Highgrove’s hedges and topiaries would be protected from William, a man who probably can’t spell the word “trowel”, let alone use one.
Now a King with expanded royal duties, Charles has handed the day-to-day management of Highgrove to its executive director, Constantine Innemée. The garden sanctuary has become a rural hypermarket and “space” raising funds through tours, private dinners, black-tie galas, classes and branded goods. Highgrove sells jams (£7.95), plant pots (£230), seeds (£7.95), picnic hampers (£150), and a “Highgrove x Burberry Castleford Trench Coat” (£2,490), as well as a £4,950 made-to-order, almost life-sized Irish moiled cow sculpture woven from British willow and bronze wire. The outward expression of Charles’s inner self was also a commercial opportunity.
Whatever was sacred about the place has become, if not profane, then at least profitable. Turnover at Highgrove last year was £6m, according to accounts for the King’s Foundation, higher than any of Charles’s other properties. The King and Innemée have had their reward: Highgrove Gardens, Tripadvisor informs us, is now number two “out of ten things to do in Tetbury”. Somebody must be buying those cow sculptures. But who is coughing up for the £180 “Wellness Day”?
The answer was me and around 24 women. We were overseen by two instructors with gleaming eyes. Everybody was dressed in harem pants and T-shirts. I was wearing dress shoes and a belt, and had forgotten to bring a yoga mat. We were ushered into the Orchard Hall’s ante-room, where a Transylvanian florilegium – a large, expensive book filled with drawings of rare flowers – took a central place in a glass box. A strategic photo of Harry, William and Charles decorated a table in the corner. The walls heaved with reproductions of Charles’s watercolours: landscapes from around the world, not a single human figure in them. I began a conversation with a retired nurse who revealed she had recently “got into ecology”. She recommended a book on yoga and bodily trauma. The other ladies drank tea around us.
Then it was outside to the gardens, where we gathered around a flower meadow and were asked to thank the plants, a proxy for Nature herself. One of the instructors said everything we did that day would be inspired by Charles’s thought, which was collected in his unsettling, apocalyptic 2010 book Harmony. (Its main thrust is that Nature will soon kill us all, so now is a good time to learn how to make dry-stone walls and plant more vegetables.)
Two prim guides turned up to show us around the grounds, which were twisty and strange, filled with odd pagan flourishes, staring busts of Jungian psychoanalysts and disturbing tributes to the late Queen Mother. One guide pointed out the best view of the house: seen from behind a statue of a naked gladiator, taking in his pert, oxidised copper arse cheeks. The ladies loved the geraniums, which bloomed hectically. Every stem and leaf looked like Charles: tense, heavily waited on. As we thanked the plants again in an artificial clearing, the hoarse sound of a lorry driving to Tetbury was just audible above the birdsong.
We returned to the Orchard Room to do yoga. One taxing afternoon in Laos aside, I had not done anything of the sort for ten years. Our instructor had a drum and gently commanded us to turn into geraniums, which the ladies did with great success. Later, in a feat of heroic fortitude, I completed a “downward dog” and found myself staring through my legs at a small portrait of Queen Camilla on the wall behind me. The session ended with a group hymn to “Divine Mother Amba”, which everyone seemed to think was normal.
Over lunch (chicken breast and vegetables, all organic) we discussed Charles’s artworks. One woman said she felt he had “really come into his own” since becoming King. A recent Sunday Times report revealing terrible staffing problems at Highgrove was not mentioned. I wondered if my fellow wellness-seekers read newspapers, or rather favoured books about trauma or following yogis on Instagram. They resembled their King: “getting into ecology”; worshipping an amorphous Nature that could threaten but never disappoint them. They left, smiling, happy, stretched out – all ideal subjects. There was the future of the British monarchy: the Crown that once demanded service in war now only wants £180 and a convincing geranium impression, and only if asked nicely enough. I suppose that’s progress, whatever “progress” means.
[See also: The Online Safety Act humiliates us all]
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This article appears in the 07 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2025