Look how his garden (and farm) grow

Mary Keen

HIGHGROVE: PORTRAIT OF AN ESTATE by HRH The Prince of Wales and Charles Clover Chapmans, £20, pp. 286 The reviewer of this Royal book needs navigational skills that are nor normally required of a pen-pusher. What with the shoals of flattery and the rocks of lese- majesty, it is hard to stay on an even keel. Is it possible to write, in the first paragraph, that this is a serious and important book, without being judged to have run aground? Or would it be better to cock a snook from the rocks and deal with HRH's predilection for exclamation marks and tendency to self-depreciation straight away?

Sycophant-spotting must be among the worst features of being Royal:

I used to have a member of my staff who would pull my leg by saying 'When His Royal Highness laughs, we all laugh'!

the Prince writes, and it is hard to know whether the courtier or the Prince had the last laugh. But when the Prince claims that,

after six years along the organic path the farm staff have all been surprised by the results and become very supportive in all aspects of the operations,

he must be on surer ground; although, poor man, he thinks that we may,

along with everyone else, think that they just agree with everything I say.

What makes the achievement at Highgrove easier to approve than the Royal joke, or the Royal opinion on architecture, is that he has done what he has been wittering on about for so long, and it works.

All those speeches about the mysterious laws of the universe, the talking to flowers and the admiration for crofters and cranks now begin to make sense. Actions, as the Prince says, speak louder than words. His amanuensis, with a mind of his own, Charles Clover, the Daily Telegraph's Envi- ronment Editor, who contributes the major portion of the book, puts it another way:

The Prince of Wales is aware that one work- ing example of sustainable agriculture is worth a hundred speeches.

Clover claims to have approached the business of writing about organic farming and gardening at Highgrove as an agnostic and I think we have to believe him, although the front drive at Highgrove turned out to be his Road to Damascus. Conversion was instant:

I first visited the Prince of Wales' estate on a still midsummer evening and fell headlong into the dreamlike state of suspended judgment that has been known to overcome Government ministers, newspaper editors and even cereal farmers on first seeing Highgrove.

For the farm I cannot speak, but I went (by kind permission of HRH) to see the garden late last summer and was bowled over. In my profession, I get the chance to visit plenty of major gardens, but the spell- binders are rare, and Highgrove is clearly one of these. In the end, the gardens that speak to the soul — the places that you want to be in, rather than just look at are the ones made by people who have put their heart and backs into the making of their gardens, as the Prince of Wales claims to have done. By the health of the plants I was less surprised, perhaps because I already know how well a regime of muck and maxicrop can work.

Along the lines of 'You've seen the film

. . ' Highgrove gives us the pictorial ver- sion of those speeches that have often seemed so curious or embarrassing. 'The special and sacred character of the soil in those places that I loved best', 'the particularly English feel of the Parkland', `the creation of the garden which has been rather like a form of worship', 'the living soul of the land bound up in the mysterious everlasting cycles of nature', agriculture, `with its root at the sense both of culture and of cult. The ideas of tillage and wor- ship are thus joined in culture.' Taken out of context, any of these remarks might appear mawkish, or endearingly cracked, but seen in the light of the Highgrove experiment, they seem to me to provide a key to understanding the much misunderstood Heir to the Throne.

Deciphering mysto-babble and spellbind- ing may convince a few journalists and dreamers that everything in the Prince of Wales' garden is lovely, but so far so unpractical. From the evidence of the book it seems that we must also concede that the Prince's organic methods are resulting in the biological diversity which many scien- tists believe is our only hope for the world's salvation. If Miriam Rothschild, the scien- tist and entomologist is to be believed, a doubling of the world's population could result in the sort of development that will reduce the natural world to rats, blue- bottles, grasses and bacteria. When the Prince of Wales wakes the world up to that horrible fact, he will have done a good job.

And this is one of me in the sea at Brighton.'

The question of how organic methods benefit the ecology of the countryside is of course central to the place of organic farming in European state-supported agriculture,

writes Clover, but adds that no proper scientific research has been carried out, until a recently commissioned joint survey of organic and inorganic farms which includes Highgrove. This is the sort of work which might not otherwise attract much attention, but the high public profile of Highgrove's owner ensures that it will be well publicised.

About farming I know much less than I do about gardening, but I know a lot more than I did, after reading Charles Clover's intelligent portrait of the estate and the problems of modern versus organic farm- ing. The book does address the questions that the amateur will want to ask. Organic farming is not generally thought of as a money-spinner and the Prince's devotion to the cause may be counter-productive in that this may reinforce the belief that going organic is a rich man's hobby. But the Duchy lands have to make a profit and after the initial losses of the first-three-year conversion period, which expires at the end of this year, the forecasts are that it will become more profitable than it would under conventional management. One of the problems with organic farming seems to be that not only is it expensive to start, but the premium that produce now com- mands will dwindle as more farmers 'con- vert'. The Prince of Wales believes that one solution may lie in co-operative marketing. Clover suggests that instead of paying farmers not to farm, or compensating them for not polluting water or damaging wildlife sites, some subsidies could be given instead to organic farmers. In the Prince's words to the Royal Agricultural Society,

at the moment, the conversion period has to be regarded as an investment and few farm- ers have anything left to invest.

The publication of Highgrove ought to give rise to a surge of popular interest in conservation and farming, as well as in organic gardening. The book deals with far more serious topics than The Spectator allows me column inches, in a way that most people can understand. The Prince was similarly committed to getting a national discussion on architecture going which has not always shown him in the best light. It is hard to see how his commitment to the causes of ecology and conservation will make him any enemies, except perhaps among the fertiliser and insecticide barons. Modest farmers may live to bless his name and those of us who love small fields and skylarks, woodpeckers and wheatsheaves, barn owls and butterflies, as well as beauti- ful gardens can only congratulate HRH, and Charles Clover, with genuine unsyco- phantic admiration, for this record of a working experiment that may signal the start of a change in our lives, as well as returning the English countryside to a pas- toral idyll.