There were certain things about which Queen Elizabeth II did not wish to be informed – such as plans for the next Coronation or for her own memorial.
While Queen Victoria greatly enjoyed unveiling monuments to herself during her lifetime, her great, great granddaughter did not.
Our late Queen would gladly cut the ribbon on hospitals, bridges and public buildings bearing her name if she was lending her title to something with a broader civic purpose. If it was a homage to her personally, however, she would find it embarrassing.
Hence, the plans for a national memorial to her are still only in the early stages nearly four years after her death.
Fresh designs are due to be unveiled on what would have been her 100th birthday – April 21st.
However, there is one (almost finished) commemorative project about which she was informed in her own lifetime: the forthcoming Queen Elizabeth II Garden in London’s Regent’s Park – revealed in all its glory for the first time today in the Daily Mail. It will be opened to the public at the end of next month (with a starring role on the BBC’s Gardeners’ World on April 17). Here, though, is an exclusive preview.
Elizabeth II had a lifelong love of gardens, as places of escape and celebration. The RHS Chelsea Flower Show was as firmly rooted in her annual diary as one of those Norman oaks in Windsor Great Park. She was also very proud of her Royal Parks, the great green lungs of the capital, whose trustees, prior to the Covid pandemic, sat down to discuss what they might do with the unsightly former yard behind their Regent’s Park office.
It had been a vast nursery and was covered in more than two acres of huge, industrial glasshouses. Various schemes were suggested including a concert hall and even a luxury spa. Covid put a halt to any plans and then someone had the idea of a garden in honour of the Queen, whose Platinum Jubilee was on the horizon in 2022.
Word was passed up through the usual channels to the top and came back down again: Her Majesty would like that very much.
And now I am here to see the result – a very impressive one, but not what I was expecting. The old greenhouses have made way for an undulating space that feels light, unstuffy and surprisingly modern.
For this is not the sort of formal English garden where colours burst in spring and early summer, while beds look forlorn and gloomy in winter. Rather, while the daffodils are in rude health today with some robust tulips coming through, the garden will have something on offer all year round. For many of the plants have been chosen from what the Queen regarded as one of her greatest achievements, the modern Commonwealth. Hence, for example, autumn visitors will find a profusion of a sky blue plumbago, Cape Leadwort, from South Africa.
Another southern visitor that flowers much later in the year is the Australian ‘silky oak’ (which is not an oak at all). All the benches are made from delightfully smooth New Zealand Accoya wood. Each seat has a gentle indentation hollowed out in the shape of the human posterior for extra comfort (‘we call them ‘bumscoops’,’ admits a gardener).
‘We all know how much the Commonwealth meant to Her Majesty,’ says former Royal Parks trustee, Wesley Kerr OBE, who has helped drive this scheme from the start. ‘So we needed the garden to be resilient in all weathers.’
As a result, when they were ripping out the old yard with all its glass houses, they crushed the concrete base into a sort of stony shingle for use in parts of the new garden. This is designed to replicate Mediterranean conditions, to cope with our ever-hotter summers.
We might not immediately associate a Queen Elizabeth II garden with crushed concrete and the Mediterranean, but it allows plants like lavender and rosemary – which the Queen loved – plus cistus and ornamental grasses to thrive. ‘Lavender hates wet feet,’ explains the Royal Parks’ head of horticulture, Matthew Pottage.
Mediterranean-style planting is ideally suited to urban conditions, says Mr Pottage, for it requires less water and intervention while supporting pollinators.
Above all, the designers have consulted the late Queen’s gardeners at Buckingham Palace and Windsor (where she loved to walk her dogs around the garden at Frogmore) to ensure that all her favourites are included.
So, the first tree to be planted here was a magnolia – and not just any magnolia. It’s called a ‘Magnolia Windsor Beauty’. There is masses of Lily of the Valley, which she adored, and plenty of myrtle, the dominant plant in her wedding bouquet. The cherry blossoms she so loved will be out any day now.
Visitors will enter through a gate by a new round pond from where a straight path leads up through the garden, reflecting the straight line of duty that ran through the Queen’s life.
At the same time, another meandering path criss-crosses it, representing the many twists and turns of her 70-year reign.
Engraved into the stonework of a raised terrace are words that the late Queen used in her 2013 Christmas broadcast: ‘We all need to get the balance right between action and reflection. With so many distractions, it is easy to forget to pause and take stock.’
And that, says Wesley Kerr, is the sentiment driving this entire £5million project, which has been entirely funded from the Royal Parks’ commercial activities (like concerts and art fairs) and private donations.
Shielded by much older trees and hedges around the perimeter, I suddenly realise just how quiet this place really is. There are no aircraft overhead and you can barely hear any London traffic.
You might look up and see the mighty Post Office Tower peering over you from half a mile away. But close your eyes and inhale the scents of the Lily of the Valley and the magnolia and you might almost be in the Cotswolds – or Canberra.
I think she’d have loved it.
