National Gardening Week
This week we’re celebrating National Gardening Week (NGW), and the enormous benefits nature can have on our wellbeing - particularly during these challenging times.
NGW is the country's biggest annual celebration of gardening, it runs from Monday 27 April - Sunday 3rd May 2020.
“It's more important than ever that we savour the beauty of flowers and trees because gardens are a natural tonic." - Alan Titchmarsh
Here at Buckingham Palace, we've enlisted the help of Mark Lane, our Head Gardener.
We're excited to share Mark's experience and insights, gained during the 28 years he's worked for Her Majesty.
We hope you enjoy these images, taken by Mark in the Buckingham Palace gardens earlier this month - hover over them to find out what they are.
With this year's Royal Horticultural Society theme - 'grow at home' - in mind, stay tuned for updates throughout the week...
The Buckingham Palace gardens in spring
Usually at this time of year, the team at Buckingham Palace are busy preparing the gardens for the annual garden parties.
An enormous amount of care and work goes into readying the gardens for the tens of thousands of invited guests.
With these events sadly having to be cancelled, Mark Lane, the Head Gardener at Buckingham Palace, has penned a wonderful introduction to the gardens.
Read below, as he describes how the gardens come to life at this time:
A stroll around the Buckingham Palace garden at this time of the year would remind us of William Wordsworth’s immortal poem referring to ‘a host of golden daffodils’, probably not the ten thousand he estimated on his walk, but an array great enough to cheer any heart. These provide but some of the wealth of colour and interest that this predominantly spring garden provides; whether it be the earlier snowdrops, primroses and bluebells or the later magnolias and lilacs, there is something to see around every corner.
Along the sinuous and winding paths unchanged since Queen Victoria’s time, it is possible to encounter a blaze of azaleas or a wall of camellias, interspersed with flowering apples, cherries and hawthorns; an array of plants from temperate countries far afield.
On closer inspection and in wooded glades, can be found plaques identifying commemorative trees planted by members of the Royal Family over the last 120 years. Two trees of note are a magnificent pair of London Plane; one planted by Queen Victoria and the other by Prince Albert, the tree’s peeling bark illuminated so successfully by the spring sunshine.
Everything looks so fresh and promising; even down to the various green hues that each different tree produces and the landscape with that Turneresque splash of strong colour tells us spring is here.
