The Nature of Royalty

Charles spoke of the sacred aspects of stewardship in a BBC lecture broadcast from Highgrove in the millennial year. "If we are to achieve genuinely sustainable development we will first have to rediscover, or re-acknowledge a sense of the sacred in our dealings with the natural world," he said.

Is Charles the most overtly spiritual member of the royal family? "Very much so," said his biographer Penny Junor. She said his spirituality embraces not just his gardening but all the other aspects of his life, including farming, his brand of organic foods, his charities and concern for the inner city and youth. "Everything he does is all joined up," she said.

Which isn't to say that Charles doesn't enjoy getting his hands dirty. He likes to "lay" living fences, a traditional skill for cutting and weaving hedgerows. Before he and the Duchess of Cornwall left for their summer in Scotland, he was in the walled vegetable garden clipping the decorative rosemary hedge around the central fountain. He gave up after a long while, later telling Howard, "Here, I've started it for you."

The vegetable garden, with its sun-trapping brick walls and sense of enclosure and tranquillity, is one of the prince's favorite spots. Here he can check on the ripening of heirloom varieties of apples and pears, see how his favorite potatoes are faring and luxuriate in the perfume of a sweet pea arbor.

Nothing much is done by the nine full-time gardeners without the prince's say, and he holds weekly sessions with Howard to discuss current tasks.

"I do a weekly report for the prince, whether he's here or away," Howard said. "Just because he's up in Scotland doesn't mean he can't get on the phone and say, 'What's happening this week?' or 'Why isn't it happening this week?' "

Donaldson notes that 27 years ago the prince came to an estate with no meaningful gardens, offering a blank slate. He worked closely with many leading expert designers, plantsmen and artists to forge the distinct garden areas that have since been built. He grew, learned and has become a confident expert "like we all do when we garden," she said. "I think of things I grew in my 20s I wouldn't touch with a barge pole today."

Among the abiding figures in his journey have been Sir Laurens van der Post and Dame Miriam Rothschild, both now dead. Van der Post was a South African author, adventurer and diplomat who became a mentor to Charles. A disciple of Carl Jung, van der Post imparted Jungian ideas of intuition and of the power of symbolic, mythological and spiritual components in both the unconscious and conscious realms of one's life. One of Jung's major archetypes was Mother Earth.

Prince Charles acknowledges that as a young man, his worries about the environment were based more on intuition than scientific knowledge. "I can only say that for some reason I felt 'in my bones' that if you abuse Nature unnecessarily and fail to maintain a balance, then She will probably abuse you in turn," he writes. A bust of van der Post is positioned prominently in his Cottage Garden.

Rothschild was one of the last great eccentric boffins in 20th-century Britain, a brilliant biologist who had seen new agricultural practices destroy the biodiversity of the flora and fauna of the English countryside. In 1982, Charles went to see her at her Northamptonshire home, Ashton Wold, and found a country estate set into deliberate decay and reversion to nature. Rothschild developed wildflower mixes to restore the native plants threatened by modern farming practices, including one she called "Farmer's Nightmare."

Thus Rothschild helped Prince Charles establish the largest single feature at Highgrove, a 4 1/2 -acre wildflower meadow that seeks to restore a balance of grasses and wildflowers while reintroducing more than 100 species of wildflowers once commonly seen in this corner of Gloucestershire.

After its early-season succession of buttercups, camassias, oxeye daisies and common sorrel, the meadow is kept mowed until the winter, when a flock of sheep grazes, reducing the field to a sea of mud. This regimen allows the self-seeded wildflowers to perpetuate and prevents the meadow from reverting to grassland.