How the King's garden inspired Burberry's latest collection

Telegraph

7 days ago

Gentle birdsong accompanies the sound of water trickling into the mossy stone fountain in the Kitchen Garden. The neat lines of green box, the apple-tree tunnel and terracotta rhubarb forcers, the narcissi, primroses and hellebores are all in spring readiness. Around the edge of the red brick wall are espaliered fruit trees, their fluffy white blossom like Impressionist splodges of paint, shining in the sun. No wonder this bucolic scene at Highgrove inspired Helen Bullock's vibrant artworks, and what could be more British than this: a collaboration between the country's flagship fashion house, Burberry, and the private residence of the King himself.
This year, for the fourth time, Burberry is producing a small fashion collection with Highgrove, and for 2025, it is a bright and beautiful 28-piece range based on Bullock's four designs inspired by the Kitchen Garden. Her joyous artwork is on the linings of trench coats, jackets and trousers (you turn up the hem); on pyjama-style separates, knitwear, ties, silk scarves and, new this year, reversible gabardine bucket hats. In her work, you can see the plant life, the pink painted wooden gates (the late Queen Mother's trademark shade) and the honeybees; the palette is fresh, rich and saturated with serotonin. This is an artist's personal interpretation of a deeply personal space, the garden created by the King over the past four decades, that is as close as one might come to a tour around the sovereign's psyche.
Although this is a private enclave with a police presence around the sandy Cotswold house familiar from so many photographs, 40,000 people a year visit the garden and come to events in The Orchard Room, the estate's restaurant. And, as the headquarters of the King's Foundation, it is like a university campus too, itself a representation of Charles the conservator: the restored farm buildings at Barley Court, on the estate, house the students learning textile skills including embroidery and millinery; nearby Street Farm contains the workshops that focus on endangered crafts, such as thatching, and the Snowdon School of Furniture. All the Highgrove revenue (as well as a proportion of Burberry profits) goes towards this worthy cause. Constantine Innemée, the executive director responsible for the King's Foundation's stewardship of Highgrove Gardens, is keen to emphasise that traditional crafts are not 'some sort of folly' but important skills that keep parts of British cultural identity alive – 'if you lose your last thatcher, then you're saying goodbye to thatched cottages, which are so emblematic to certain parts of the country' – and are also a route to a career.
Today the place is a hive: a team of four is painting a (reclaimed and embellished) cast-iron gate that leads to the formal Sundial Garden in His Majesty's favourite dark forest green; the first lady of Zanzibar and her delegation are coming up a gravel path on a tour as a party of tourists is led elsewhere. Picture-book hens run around the orchard. The gardeners, led by Gráinne Ring, tend and nurse and prune in the King's environmentally friendly, pesticide-free fashion.
'Highgrove is a vivid and living sketchbook of colour and ideas for everyone at Burberry,' says Daniel Lee, Burberry's chief creative officer, adding, 'Inviting a British illustrator like Helen Bullock to cast her exceptional creative eye over the flora and fauna of Highgrove Garden, and then decorate this new capsule collection, lends some extra creative magic.' For Bullock – a Central Saint Martins graduate who has worked with Louis Vuitton and Liberty, and whose creations are distinctively bold and blithe – the difficulty was where to start in the 'vast and rich' gardens, but she 'soon fell for the tangled sway of wild flowers and that special combination of dancing poppies and cosmos.'
The rich canvas that inspired Bullock was the vision of the King himself, watercolourist and plant lover, who took on the overgrown and under-loved site outside Tetbury, Gloucestershire, when it was bought, before his first marriage, by the Duchy of Cornwall in 1980. With the finest gardeners he knew – including the Marchioness of Salisbury, Rosemary Verey and Miriam Rothschild – he created a series of inter-linked garden rooms that today show: a wild-flower meadow, the seed mix created by Rothschild before it was a trend; the Victorian-inspired Stumpery, by Julian and Isabel Bannerman, where the roots of trees blown down on the Sandringham Estate in the great storm of 1987 have been planted with hostas and ferns, like a scene from the Brothers Grimm; the Thyme Walk, where herbs grow between paving stones, surrounded by hallucinatory topiary – old yew bushes preserved and cut as the gardeners saw fit (Christmas puddings, something that looks like a Walnut Whip). At the Shand Gate, which was planted in memory of the Queen's brother, Mark Shand, who co-founded the Elephant Family charity, a bushy elephant is still growing its trunk.
Punctuating the plant life are structures, like Catherine the Great's garden at Tsarskoe Selo. Or perhaps Stowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire (where there is a grand Temple of British Worthies) in miniature: here there is the eccentric Wall of Worthies – the floating heads of friends and people the King admires, on top of a wall – including Richard Chartres, former Bishop of London; the organic farming campaigner Patrick Holden; and Debo, the late Duchess of Devonshire. By the Stumpery is the elfin treehouse built for William and Harry when they were children, raised on stilts and sporting a new thatched haircut (by a graduate of the King's Foundation). Most intriguing of all is the Sanctuary, a cross-shaped stone building with a pitched roof, stained glass and no electricity, built for the millennium, which has a chimney and a door code known only, it is said, by the King. It is a romantic Royal retreat, a hermitage or hobbit house with a fireplace and lit only by candles.
When the King returns here from a trip, he always wanders around the garden, seeing what has grown. But he does not expect, or want, anything manicured: there is a pleasing edge of wildness here to hearten any gardener who finds precision elusive. 'The ethos ultimately is about working with nature,' says Ring, who points out that when the King, still much involved, talks about the environment, he talks 'from years of experience and years of experimentation'. Visitors are surprised, she says, often expecting classical English formality. But 'nature isn't always perfect,' and anyway, the King has a playful, whimsical streak. There are, for example, willow ramps for hedgehogs to climb out of the water features should they fall in; behind the garden and the Foundation is the idea of living in harmony with nature. As Innemée puts it, the King's team are 'talking about everything, from the way we design and build cities to supply chains for fashion and materials that are used in furniture creation'. Indeed the Burberry range is made with certified wool and organic cotton and silk.
Just like the Burberry collection – or perhaps the King himself – the gardens, as Innemée says, 'draw on traditional cues but at the same time, it's surprising and quite modern'. That mossy fountain in the garden painted on a silk scarf, or the real thing – either will capture that 'happy garden-state', as Marvell wrote: 'How could such sweet and wholesome hours/Be reckon'd but with herbs and flow'rs!'