“It’s like a dream, a dream of a garden,” says the perfumer Julie Pluchet of the outdoor spaces at Highgrove, the Gloucestershire family home of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. “It’s very inspiring for a perfumer, because there are so many flowers and plants. You want to smell everything, but the colours and textures are incredible too. Really, it’s a piece of art.”
When the Prince first took ownership of the estate in 1980, the gardens were largely neglected and overgrown. Now, more than 40 years later, it bursts with colour and life and scent, routinely astonishing the 40,000 visitors to the garden each year. There are the quietly meandering pathways of the Cottage Garden, the tunnelled walkways of the Kitchen Garden, and the four-acre Wildflower Meadow, to which new species are added every year, cut in summer for hay after the wisteria and hornbeams have flowered.
