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The Garden
December 2004

Winter Palace gardens

The home of the Society's Patron, Her Majesty The Queen, boasts perhaps the most famous 'secret garden' in the world. Jane Brown explores the history of the gardens at Buckingham Palace

Images: Christopher Simon Sykes

WINTER MAGIC Early morning mist and a fall of snow give the Palace an unusually Russian air

CLASSICAL CURVES A small summerhouse can be seen across the sweep of the formal Rose Garden (above), laid out in the 1960s by the rosarian Harry Wheatcroft. These are traditional rose beds planted in blocks of single cultivars, often with a Royal connection such as the large bed of Alex Cocker’s Rosa ‘Silver Jubilee’

Snowfall in London usually only inspires traffic chaos and slush these days, but there is one place where the wintry magic can survive, in the garden of Buckingham Palace. Midwinter is the most quiet time here; autumn’s glorious colours in the maples, dogwoods, beeches, chestnuts, ash, golden catalpa, Nyssa sylvatica and rare Chinese Photinia beauverdiana var. notabilis are all faded, and the snow turns the garden into dusky monochrome. Seen across the white carpet of lawn the west front of the Palace, built for George IV by John Nash, has changed little since Queen Victoria first saw it more than 160 years ago; she was overawed by the huge building but delighted with the garden for the sake of her spaniel Dash. Look the other way, through the rimy branches, and it is almost imaginable that the trees might still stretch as far as the villages of Brompton and Chelsea.

The bronze cranes that stand over a blanket of snow were presented to King Edward VII during a visit to India as Prince of Wales in 1875-6

Four hundred years ago these 16ha (39 acres) were fields outside the western boundary of the Royal hunting park of St James’s Palace: in the 1640s the fields were gathered into a garden by Lord Goring, a Cavalier who then lost everything in the Civil War. The powerful politician, Lord Arlington (1618-85) bought Goring’s freehold property, and he took a 99-year lease on the plot of Crown land next door, the notorious Mulberry Garden, which he closed down in 1677. Arlington was a keen gardener, he had a lovely flower garden - ‘a blooming wilderness of sweets’ - lilies, violets, carnations and ‘the painted tulip and the blushing rose’, celebrated in John Dryden’s poem about Arlington House.

After Arlington’s death in 1685 the Duke of Buckingham (1646-1721) bought the house, rebuilding it and calling it after himself. Buckingham had even greater gardening ambitions and paid Queen Anne’s gardener, Henry Wise (1653-1738) a first retainer of £1,000 for laying out a beautiful forecourt facing the St James’s Park Mall, elaborate formal plats de broderie, with statues and fountains beside Buckingham House and a 550m-long (600yd) canal (exactly like the St James’s Park canal) which stretched across a meadow of wild flowers. The Duke also had a splendid kitchen garden, a grove of lime trees where nightingales sang and a glasshouse with orange trees in pots.

From house to palace

A view across the lake in spring; Queen Victoria’s consort Prince Albert had the island created for wildlife

The Duke’s garden was much coveted by the Royal Family, cooped up in dusty old St James’s Palace, the whole populace passing by their windows - the Royal Parks had been open to Londoners since Charles I’s reign. Eventually, George III found he was able to buy Buckingham House (for £28,000) in 1762 because the lease on the Crown land, the old Mulberry Garden, was running out - and half of Buckingham House and the formal garden were built on the leased land. For the King and his Queen, Charlotte of Mecklenburgh-Strelitz (for whom Strelitzia reginae was named) it was their private home, where most of their children were born, and remained so until Charlotte’s death in 1818. They commissioned ‘Capability’ Brown to redesign the garden as a ‘park’ and Brown’s serpentine drive around the perimeter has remained the frame of the garden to this day.

George IV decided that ‘Buckingham Palace’ should be the sovereign’s London home, but he had waited so long for his throne he did not have time to do anything to the garden. It was left to the Royal Master Gardener William Townsend Aiton (1766-1849), a founder of the Horticultural Society in 1804, to carry out Nash’s sketchy design for the lake, which he excavated in 1827-8. He also arranged the flower beds and walks on the north side of the garden. The ‘wild’ state of the garden and the ‘unprofessional’ status of the Palace gardeners (mostly ex-servicemen) that awaited the young Victoria were hotly debated in the press; Aiton, grossly overloaded with responsibilities and looking forward to his retirement, came in for blame and, occasionally, praise.

Victorian playground

Prince Albert, who Victoria married in 1841, felt himself to be ‘a natural gardener’ (he supported the Horticultural Society and arranged its Royal Charter in 1861) and he took matters in hand; his appointment of George Wyness as Head Gardener brought about vast improvements in maintenance and soon the garden became a happy playground for Victoria and Albert’s young family. They were keen on outdoor games, skittles and ‘tag’ - imagine the Queen and her ladies in their crinolines chasing through the willow fronds - they had boating parties and Albert had the island in the lake made for a bird sanctuary. When the lake froze there were enthusiastic skating parties - once Albert, a rather showy skater, fell through the ice and the Queen rescued him.

The post of Head Gardener at Buckingham Palace has been proudly held; the widowed Queen Victoria had confidence in Edwin Humphreys, and John Richard Stirling’s garden was the setting for her splendid Jubilee parties in 1887 and 1897; Alfred J Cole was in post from 1928-54, followed by Fred Nutbeam MVO (1914-97), the garden’s ‘rejuvenator’ who retired after the present Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. A grove of orange-red evergreen azalea Rhododendron ‘Fred Nutbeam’ raised by George Hyde of Ferndown and a present to Her Majesty, flowers in the garden in his memory.

Splendid trees dominate this garden. King Edward VII loved planting trees wherever he went, a habit applauded by the horticultural world, and here his example has been followed with plantings by kings and queens down the 20th century - Indian chestnuts, oaks, limes and maples have been the most favoured. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh’s four children each ‘have’ an oak (Quercus robur) growing from an acorn germinated on the day they were born. There is also a silver lime (Tilia tomentosa), a present from the RHS, planted in 1977 for the Silver Jubilee.

Continuing Royal tradition

Rhododendrons are also prominent, the especial favourites of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Palace gardeners have recently reared a hybrid from a splendid specimen of the famous white Rhododendron ‘Loderi King George’ (named for George V) and R. ‘Bulstrode Park’ which they named R. ‘London Calling’ and gave to The Queen for her 70th birthday. The influence of that great gardener, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother is still felt here, with so many of the scented, flowering and labour-saving shrubs that she had planted during the difficult 1930s and 40s still evident, and the summertime ritual of the pyramids of sweet peas that scent the long herbaceous border.

Though seen by increasing numbers of visitors to garden parties and the Palace summer opening, this garden is essentially The Queen’s private garden. Except for a short break in the early years of her marriage it has been her London home since she was 10 years old. Every significant change or new scheme has to have her approval, and every Monday morning that she is in residence her gardeners send her a posy of the most interesting plants in flower. But it is also a hard-working garden, ‘on duty’ for many occasions we never hear about, for a stream of state visits, for charity events for one of the Royal Family’s favoured causes, or for one of the quiet garden parties that The Queen gives at her pleasure each year for perhaps the Chelsea Pensioners, her tenants from Sandringham, the charity for disabled ex-servicemen - the Not-Forgotten Association - or even (in 1986) the Welsh Crown Green Bowling Association’s 40th Anniversary.

Magnificent microclimate

Since he was appointed Head Gardener in 1992, Mark Lane has exploited the walled, inner-city, mild microclimate of the garden to introduce hundreds of new species - ‘pushing the boundaries’ - with Clethra arborea and its lily-of-the-valley-like flowers; Arbutus canariensis; strongly fragrant, twining climber Mandevilla laxa; and exquisite, magnolia-like Michelia figo. Banana plants provide grand-scale foliage for the Herbaceous Border, which is 156m (512ft) long and 5m (16ft) deep; they can be overwintered in situ with a straw covering.

In the formerly empty, boggy area beyond the lake known to the gardeners as ‘the Mudhole’, seven beds have been made of plants native to North America: these include Darmera peltatum (umbrella plant), with umbels of pink flowers, as well as many trilliums and ferns. American native azaleas, pieris, Jamesia americana of the hydrangea family, and Actaea or baneberry are grown in ericaceous beds.

The ‘London effect’ also helps Castanea mollissima (Chinese chestnut), a round-leaved beech, golden catalpa, and Photinia beauverdiana var. notabilis, as well as the curious shrub Helwingia japonica, the flowers of which develop on the surface of the leaves.

Provisional National Plant Collection of mulberries

The National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens (NCCPG) has awarded provisional status to Buckingham Palace’s collection of mulberries; 29 taxa have been collected, many of them cultivars of Morus alba (white mulberry) including weeping M. alba ‘Pendula’ and long-lobed M. alba ‘Laciniata’. Also included are two selections of Morus rubra, with rounded, downy leaves that turn vivid yellow in autumn.

The collection is appropriate because the present Buckingham Palace owes its existence to a walled garden of mulberries planted in the 1620s on land in Royal ownership but outside the west gate of St James’s Park, then a Royal hunting park. King James I had wanted to start an English silk industry, but his ‘Mulberry Men’, who invested money and labour in planting thousands of seedlings of Morus nigra (black mulberry) failed to realise that the silkworms prefer white mulberries, and the enterprise was duly abandoned.

Later, and especially in the years 1654-64, the Mulberry Garden flourished as a pleasure garden of doubtful reputation, the haunt of artists, aristocrats and poets, and inevitably visited by the diarist Samuel Pepys, all enjoying the house speciality - mulberry tarts.

An urban oasis for wildlife

From the air, Buckingham Palace gardens stand out as a green oasis in the heart of a bustling capital city

It was on the 5 June 1956, just three years after the young Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, that a small party of London botanists visited the garden at Buckingham Palace for the first time. They found themselves walking into an urban naturalist’s dream - in their own words - ‘a 39-acre haven walled off from the rest of the metropolis for over a century, well provided with water, bushes, and other vegetation, free from public disturbance, and largely unexamined’. Their visit, organised by the naturalist (and heather expert) David McClintock VMH, initiated two series of recordings of the plants and other species of wildlife in the garden in the 1960s and the 1990s, by members of the London Natural History Society.

These recordings reveal the teeming secret populations of this inner-city garden, a botanical time-capsule, including rare moths, previously-unknown species of beetle and fungi, pollution-sensitive mosses and both known species of pipistrelle bats. A kingfisher, woodpeckers, a nesting tawny owl and migrant smew and goosander are among the 60 kinds of birds recorded. A sandpit, originally made for HRH The Prince of Wales 50 years ago, has a wooden cover that is home to a scarce lichen, Physcia dubia.

The surveys have prompted a progressively wildlife-friendly scheme of management with all the green waste recycled for compost and mulches, discreet piles of logs left to rot to provide a habitat for some of the garden’s 287 species of beetle, a long-grass regime operating in remoter parts of the garden, and the use of chemicals kept to a minimum.

Full details of the recordings are published as: The Natural History of Buckingham Palace Garden, parts 1 & 2, edited by Colin W Plant, in the Supplement to The London Naturalist No. 78:1999 and No. 80: 2001. Copies are available for £6 plus £1 p&p each from: the London Natural History Society, Catherine Schmitt, 4 Falkland Avenue, London N3 1QR.

This article has been taken from the book: The Garden at Buckingham Palace, Jane Brown, 224pp, 2004, Royal Collection Publications, £30, ISBN 1902163826.

Jane Brown is a freelance garden writer and author

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