Monday 12th May 2025

In a moment of madness I booked the Garden Museum Exclusive Tour of Sandringham with the Head Gardener. There would have been a ticket for Royston King but he wasn’t quick enough – held up in meetings in the upper corridors of power. The tour sold out at once. So he said the Head Gardener could be dispensed with, only the King would do .. why bother with Sandringham?

I over-nighted with Herbert Morrison and St Anselm at Cromer. They did 3 courses. There were no outrages. Herbert Morrison has acquired some kind of mechanical violin, called a Nyckleharpa, from Glasgow at great expense. I undertook to fetch it from Ladywell whence it had been brought by another friend from Scotland. From there I motored it to Cromer. St Anselm said now he faced the horror of it being played which began at once. Otherwise the talk was of aged relatives and their carry-on.

The next morning arrival at Sandringham took place at 9.30. Glorious sunshine. Tour members elderly, some gays, deeply anonymous. No self-introducing. It would all have been different if Royston King had been there. I lack the killer instinct. One lady claimed to know what the weather is going to be all summer. We went through the wall into Sandringham demesne. The last time I was there ( seven or eight years ago) this was an experience almost of terror, a sudden plunge back to 1880, the hideous house lowering over a vast lawn, an aura of conifers and rhododendrons, a sinister lake where a recently drowned governess might have haunted had there been a recently drowned governess.

Now all transformed. Sensational. The lawn turned into a rough meadow, huge bulb planting and masses of acers (both Japanese and other). The ugly house blotted out, a wonderful verdant scene, enclosed by the existing trees, the essence of what a country house should be, where the outside world is shut out and within is a better place.

We went on the topiary garden right in front of the house. I’d no idea it would be so huge. One acre. Next to it is a sunken maze . The King at the last minute said, ‘ How about a stepped bank?’ Or rather he used a technical term which the Head Gardener had to pretend to understand. Making the stepped bank on three sides of a kind of basin in which the maze sits turned out to be quite complicated. They had to get their set-squares and slide-rules out.

Then we were shown a rockery that had sprung into being in the past ten days.

Well, it’s a great kingly scheme. Only a king could have done it – and all within 3 years. But poignant. Lilibet rather pushed out of the way. She’d never have spent millions on a topiary garden. The King must have been waiting to pounce. Now, though, we have important new horticulture, the most important new garden design likely to occur in the Kingdom for some time.

Luncheon was given in a Women’s Institute type hall. There was some banter. Those who’d been annoying on the tour with their attention-seeking non-questions turned out to be bearable. A man retired from banking told one of those stories in which somebody like Mark Carney or Keir Starmer had been a tea-boy when first encountered by him or somebody he knew millennia ago. It might have been true. Gays slightly gravitated and more so during the tour of the house. Now there’s a jigsaw puzzle Their Majesties are supposedly in medias res with laid out in the saloon (which is really the hall). In the darling drawing room I said to the apparent kitchen (or perhaps son) of a man in his 50s, ‘It’s all so unbelievably granny and bedroom.’ He had on a frock-type outfit in black and was more than up to my remark. We agreed that the panelling needed to be picked out in different shades, not just flat slamming cream.

In the dining room the guide said he thought the King was going to strip off all Queen Mary’s green paint (also flat, the panelling not picked out) and go back to the oak. We agreed that the nightmare of Nitromors didn’t bear thinking about. It’s possible that the King thinks so too. Two tables have been stripped but no more.

In the old reign such free and easy talk about paint finishes would never have been allowed. All Lilibet’s hard-wearing upholstery from John Lewis has been abolished.

Outside on the entrance front there’s some really frightful public park planting and new peculiar garden seats in odd colours. The husband or father of the young man in the partial frock was depressed by them. His theme of not liking gathered momentum, careered rather, until he was saying, ‘What’s the point of Sandringham? It’s time to get rid of it.’

It was a moment of madness.