Lady Carnarvon of Highclere: ‘I walk my pony in the garden, sometimes I bring her into the house'
Where do you live?
Highclere Castle sits on a chalk escarpment that is relatively high up for this part of Berkshire. It's surrounded by the greenest of lawns and is backed by long distant views that include woodlands and rolling fields. However, when you come up the main drive, you might be tempted to think, 'Where are the gardens?' About 300 years ago, there were several formal gardens, including great shrubberies and large herbaceous borders at the front which led all the way round to a folly, but during the two world wars, they were grassed over. When my husband Geordie and I took over, there was still only a skinny offering of gardens, but as we are both passionate gardeners, we wanted to change that. We had a wonderful team behind us and plenty of ideas, but we were also determined to get our hands in the soil.
What has been your approach at Highclere?
When I first came here, I probably worried quite a lot about what other people thought, including my new ideas for gardens. You've only got to be reminded that Capability Brown designed the parkland here to fill you with a sense of doubt. But one day, Lady Jeannie, Geordie's mother, turned to me and said: 'Fiona, this is your home; create something which you think would be right for Highclere.' That gave me the confidence I needed. Of course, there is so much history: people have lived here for 1,200 years – the Bishops of Winchester owned it for 800. One of the oldest known gardens we have is called the Monks' Garden and it dates back to the 12th century, when monks cultivated it for fresh produce and herbal remedies. So, this has partly inspired my healing herb garden beside the courtyard. It not only allowed me to explore an area of plants I'm passionate about, but was also a perfect way of connecting to the castle's fascinating past.
Which projects has your husband enjoyed the most?
Fifteen years ago, Geordie decided to turn an area of the grounds around the back of the castle into a wildflower meadow. He entered into it with tremendous gusto and his hard work has paid off. Come late spring, the meadows are a sight to behold. It has also given us wonderful surprises, including some of Britain's rarest orchids which suddenly started popping up to say hello. We keep a mowed lawn running through it, so it's the most wonderful walk in the morning with the dogs – we have eight labradors. Geordie's also passionate about the spring bulbs. Some 300,000 have been planted in the grounds – snowdrops, crocuses, narcissi, wild tulips, camassias, fritillarias, alliums – and he extends that area every year. In fact, we have a wonderful bulb specialist called Michael Lubbe who comes over from Holland in the autumn and in two hours plants 5,000 'time-lapse' bulbs with his machine. I always laugh because when it's time to get out the spring catalogues, I put in a request for a few things, only to find he's already used up the entire bulb budget on his own selections.
What are the themes that have inspired some of your other gardens?
A garden is a wonderful place to remember and celebrate the people we love, so Geordie and I have both dedicated gardens to our mothers. Geordie's mother, Lady Jeanie, died in 2019 and the area we chose for her sits on a soft slope looking westward – towards Wyoming, the place where she was born. She loved pastel blues and adored every shade of white, so there are creamy lupins, Rosa rugosa and philadelphus, which has a scent that is absolutely divine. Towering Jerusalem artichokes add a touch of silver with their large, elegant leaves. To one side of it is a temple and after a few hours of planting or weeding, we'll often sit there with the dogs and watch the sun going down. A short walk away is a rose arbour in memory of my mother, Frances. As she loved literature, I've filled it with roses named after her favourite characters, including the deep pink Gabriel Oak rose and a bright crimson Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Like my father, my mother died of cancer very young. It has taken time to create these gardens, and they mean a lot to us, but like time itself, gardening can be a very healing process.
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Did you have a garden as a child?
I was the eldest of six girls and we grew up in central London. We lived in a flat, which meant we didn't have a garden, but we had a balcony where our mother used to keep plants. At the weekend, however, our parents had to get us out, so we'd often be marched around St James's Park to use up our energy and improve our moods. My father, who worked in the City, loved golf, and would often drop us at Wisley Park while he went off to play. Once the big holidays came, we were very fortunate to have a seaside home in Cornwall, but some of my fondest memories are of staying at a large farmhouse in Kent which was owned by good friends of our parents. It was such a wonderful Darling Buds of May experience, with a duck pond in the middle of a croquet lawn, and everything from chickens to ponies keeping us occupied. My sister Lucy and I would often go off on the ponies with our Ordnance Survey map. Even now, I can hear my mother saying: 'Don't be back late, darling. It's treacle tart for lunch and Queenie's making it especially for you.' When it was time to go back to London, we always wanted to bring the ponies with us.
Did that outdoor experience stay with you as you got older?
Thankfully, we're now learning how beneficial it is to spend time in nature… to spend time in the garden. By the time I was a chartered accountant in my 20s, I craved the outdoors and would often volunteer to help people do their gardens at the weekend. It was such a relief from sitting at a desk all week. I'm a great believer in how being outside improves your mood and general well-being. And, of course, I still love ponies; in fact, I now have Pheobe, my Arab pony, whom I often take for walks around the gardens. On occasion, I'll even bring her into the house, too! She's such a sweetie and loves having a little look around but is always very respectful of floors and furnishings. Sometimes, I think you just get to a point in life when you want to go back in time and revisit all your fond memories. Even when I think back to my mother's balcony garden, it's a reminder that gardening comes in all shapes and sizes. I've recently found a new love of container planting; our new head gardener Emmeline has been helping me fill some big containers in the middle of the courtyard with small cherry trees and summer plants. I can't tell you the pleasure I get from that. I'm going to experiment with barrels next, and then I'll think about a few balconies. The castle manager John Gundill has renamed it Tut's Plaza.
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Do you think gardening helps you on a deeper level?
Over the years, Geordie and I have created many winding paths to take you from one garden to the next, and I've come to realise there's something very therapeutic, very symbolic, about walking on a winding path. It's a bit like life itself. As one gets older, you begin to appreciate that you don't always know where life's going to lead you or who you're going to meet along the way. Working on these gardens has certainly taken me on a wonderful journey in life and I hope it continues.
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A Mastercard, which is linked to my iPhone, and doesn't have a limit on it, so I could just go out and tap my phone and buy a car. I prefer using a credit card as I have a larger spending limit on it than a debit card. • Read more money advice and tips on investing from our experts A little bit of both. I love a bargain. When the kids were little they thought I shopped in a supermarket called Reduced because there was a yellow 'reduced' sticker on so much of our shopping. Do I still do that now? Oh, yeah. Today I brought home some awful sausages with hardly any meat in them because they had a yellow sticker. My husband is a wonderful chef. He's all about the ingredients, but I'm all about the budget. I can't help it. I didn't really catch a break in my career until I was about 26. I was broke for a long time, and I come from quite an ordinary background. I'm not tight but I'm used to just watching my pennies. Yes, we bought this house in Henley-on-Thames for £625,000 in 2005. It's a huge, slightly ugly dormer bungalow, with five bedrooms, four bathrooms, a swimming pool, a gym in the garage and half an acre of land. We all have our own space, which was particularly useful when we went through the horrors of lockdown. Yes, probably. I don't know what my dad's salary was, but we had a very pleasant life. Eventually. We didn't ever have a bad life, but we were evicted on to the street in the early 1960s when I was little because they fell behind on the rent. But then Dad did reasonably well, and we ended up with a four-bedroom detached house with a big garden. He had a steady salary. When T'Pau took off, after years of being completely skint it was a bit like winning the lottery. Suddenly a ton of money came in. I managed to keep some money, and I'm still paid very nicely for what I do. I think I probably do earn more than they did. • Chesney Hawkes: How did I blow through £8m? Because I was an idiot I'm not going to tell you, but it had a nice number of zeros on the end. My first ever job was when I was 16 and I was working behind the till on a Saturday at a shop called John Menzies, which was like WH Smith. It was utterly terrifying because they didn't add up for you then, and for me maths felt like Russian. It was about 50 years ago but I can still remember the queue of people huffing and puffing while I worked out their shopping. I guess when Ronnie and I bought a three-storey Victorian house in London for £205,000 in 1988. Some money had started to come in, and we upgraded the car and then we thought, let's go for it. The record company said, 'Well, there's a lot of money coming in through the pipeline. Do you want an advance on what's coming?' They gave us £200,000 to help us buy the house. • Clare Grogan: 'Being in Altered Images earned me £75 a week' God, yeah. I was skint even when we were recording [their debut album] Bridge of Spies. I was absolutely brassic. I remember there was ice on the inside of the windows of our flat because we couldn't afford to put the heating on. We had to sit in sleeping bags. The pipes froze really badly on quite a few occasions. And I remember going out and collecting snow and boiling it to wash my hair. That's why I can be very resourceful, because I had to be back then. I was shopping in charity shops and wearing some old bloke's blazer long before it was trendy. Our first album, Bridge of Spies, because obviously the big hits came off that. China in Your Hand still keeps me very busy. I'm not going to give royalty numbers — it's not as much as you think because of streaming. Because it's such a popular song and people seem to still love the 1980s, it gives me a platform to keep working — most of my money is from live work. I appeared on The Masked Singer and it was a lot of money. The other week I performed at a club in Bedford and, after paying the band, I came away with about £3,500. Two years ago I performed in the Night of the Proms tour across Germany and Luxembourg with a 60-piece orchestra, and that was really nice and really good money as well. Nice gigs just crop up, which is lovely. And it gives me some financial stability as well. With the way these governmental pickpockets behave and change their mind and break their promises, I'd say probably property. I just have this home. I haven't gone down the buy-to-let route. I don't want the responsibility of making sure other people are happy. I really don't. And then if you give it to an agency, there's a huge percentage to pay. I did start a private pension years ago, and I completely forgot to top it up. There's not that much in it, not really. I do have other things like Isas, and a few stocks and shares. Probably my house. I can be a bit flutterish about other things, but I gave it quite a lot of thought — about the location, what the house was going to give to us, how we could move our lives forward. And I always think at the end of the day, if the work dries up, if the money runs out, I have the house. We've nearly paid the mortgage off. I could pay it off if I wanted to. There's about £3,000 left. I treasure my home. I don't think I've made one, because I'm not courageous or curious. • Dave Robinson: You need money in the music biz, but it's the root of all evil Wine. I regularly order a box from Majestic, or one of those really nice wine companies. I have an amazing capacity to sit and watch Netflix and drink. I probably spend about £70 a week on wine at home, and then if we go out and eat, that's way more expensive. It could be about £150 a week on wine, easily. The place where I like to go has put a large glass up to £21. £21! F***ing ridiculous. They have a captive audience here. It's very, very expensive here and in Marlow. When I'm out, people say, well, why don't you just buy a bottle? I go, because that would be unseemly, but I usually end up drinking a bottle. But I think if I drink it by the glass it looks better. In about 1991 I spent two grand on an Azzedine Alaïa dress. It's what they call bodycon. Really tight. It's like wearing a corset. You can't breathe in it. I just didn't like it in the end. I gave it away to a mate. My kids. I just want to make sure my kids will be OK. I think it's quite tough out there for them at the moment. I'd buy my kids a house each so they've got something. And I'd probably fund an advertising campaign for a record, because that's what I miss. Ronnie has a studio, I can negotiate terms of musicians — I can cover all that. I did it a few years ago, but where the money is needed is the advertising. On the promotional campaign, making videos, ads, all that kind of thing. I miss that. I know you can use social media, but it's really hard to break through. I find it frustrating that if I put a new song out, nobody really knows. You're preaching to the converted. And so I think I'd spoil myself with an advertising campaign. I've started to focus my support on local organisations. I used to donate to the big charities but now I don't trust them any more. I think it's a business. I tend to focus on a local hospice and special needs centre for kids. I'd rather see exactly where my money goes. That it's freedom. I don't know how I'd cope if it all disappeared tomorrow. I'm used to being able to do pretty much what I want, within reason. For tour dates and new music visit
