A royal success

The gardens of Sandringham House, Sandringham, Norfolk A home of His Majesty King Charles III

- Charles Quest-Ritson

In only three years, The King has overseen a remarkable resurrection of the gardens and parkland at Sandringham. Charles Quest-Ritson visits

MOST gardens have their ups and downs, even royal ones. The gardens at Sandringham in Norfolk reached their peak at the beginning of the 20th century, when Edward VII laid them out on an imperial scale and employed some 100 gardeners. Fifty years later, they hit their nadir, when the walled kitchen gardens and most of the formal gardens around the house were abandoned. Their recent resurrection by The King is little short of miraculous.

The kitchen gardens remain unmanicured, used as grazing for foals from the Royal Stud, but Sandringham's 60 acres of pleasure gardens, surrounded by woods and parkland, are once again a showcase of the finest designs, expressed through an exceptional palette of plants. All this is the fruit of The King's determination not only to give the great house a setting appropriate to its architecture and history—in the 1960s, there had even been plans to demolish the whole building—but also to plant a beautiful garden that visitors can enjoy and be inspired by.

The King, then Prince of Wales, took over the running of the 21,000-acre Sandringham estate in 2017, converting its agriculture to organic procedures and adopting the principles of integrated agroforestry, enhancing soil health, improving biodiversity, sequestering carbon and providing shelter from extreme weather. He realised many years ago that the gardens would need restoration, renewal and replanting, but it wasn't until towards the end of 2022—when the groundwork was in place—that he was finally able to turn his attention to these 60 acres of rich, free-draining, sandy soil.