Prince Charles and Princess Anne‘s love of the great outdoors started when they were just children and bonded them for life.
During an appearance on the BBC radio show The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed, the Prince of Wales reminisced about how he and his younger sister spent some of their childhood gardening. “My sister and I had a little vegetable patch in the back of some border somewhere,” he told the show’s host Simon Armitage. “We had great fun trying to grow tomatoes rather unsuccessfully and things like that.” Of course, they also had the help of a “wonderful” head gardener at their London palace, Mr. Nutbeam. Charles added, “He was splendid and he helped us a bit, my sister and I with the little garden we had.” It also helped that the royal siblings were so close in age, born just two years apart, whereas Prince Andrew was born almost a decade later and Prince Edward four years after that.
And that childhood love of horticulture has stuck with the heir apparent to this day. Charles has been an environmentalist for decades and very outspoken about the devastating effects of climate change. He told the BBC, “I don’t want to be confronted by my grandchildren and other people’s grandchildren saying, ‘Why didn’t you do something when you could?’” In May, the royal announced that he’s in the process of converting his mother Queen Elizabeth‘s Sandringham Estate—which he took over running from his late father Prince Philip in 2017— into a “fully organic operation.” Charles explained in an interview with Country Life magazine, “At a global scale, it is becoming ever clearer to me that the very future of humanity may depend to a large extent on a mainstream transition to more sustainable farming practices, based on what are known as regenerative, agro-ecological principles, as well as innovative methods of agroforestry—something we are also putting into practice at Sandringham.” Charles has also recently been advocating for a charter called the Terra Carta that would ensure corporations include green initiatives in all future planning, asking them to agree to almost 100 actions to become more sustainable by 2030.
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