Highgrove Garden Tours

Many tour groups and coach parties come to visit HRH Prince Charles' garden at Highgrove throughout the spring and summer. We know that lunch is an important element of a great day out and our approach is be completely flexible. We will work to suit your time schedule and budget.

We can offer you a set menu with 3 or 4 choices per course, a buffet style meal, a Cotswold cream tea or simple sandwiches. We know what dishes and menus work so we'll make suggestions and work to your requirements. We prefer a pre-order but it's not essential.

We are in the centre of town so an ideal base for those who might want to do a little shopping around the great boutiques and stores in Tetbury and right opposite us, you'll find the Highgrove Tetbury shop if you need to stock up on even more goodies.

Please call us to book a table or discuss a menu for your day out on 01666 505690

Article From The Times 28th March 2009

Tour Prince Charles's Highgrove gardens

The humour of the Prince of Wales is on view on a tour of his beloved country home's gardens

If the Prince of Wales lived in suburbia it's my guess that he'd have a gnome or two. Not full-on gnomes from Wyevale, but rescued gnomes, placed with a sense of irony to peep from behind foliage, their coats painted discreet shades of green and brown by the royal hand.

I make this observation after a visit to his gardens at Highgrove. We know that he has a spirited sense of fun but it's only when you visit his home territory that you catch a more intimate glimpse of what makes him smile.

“You are entering an old fashioned establishment,” says a sign on the way to the Orchard Room, the reception centre where the tour begins. It's a teasing statement, deliberate, too, because Highgrove incorporates the Prince of Wales's philosophies: everything is organic here and proves that gardening without chemicals is not only possible but is also fruitful and satisfying.

It is more than 28 years since the Duchy of Cornwall bought the house and the 15-acre garden around it, then almost featureless. Now the land is a breathtaking meld of bold planting, quirky architectural details, idiosyncratic topiary and stunning vistas.

Yet in spite of the scale 30,000 bulbs were planted last autumn, trimming the topiary takes the garden team more than three months a year and pruning the fruit trees and roses a further five weeks - there is a sense of a person who puts his dreams into these gardens, who works them and uses them.

At almost every turn you see something surprising. This could be the jaw-droppingly beautiful set of three tall slate vases, or the Wall of Gifts, an eccentric collection of pieces of stone. Well, princes get a lot of gifts and HRH makes imaginative use of them.

I am reliably informed by his head gardener, an elegant and straightforward woman called Debs Goodenough, that Prince Charles not only thinks up the ideas for his gardens but also that he gets his hands dirty; he is heavily involved in planting. He has big working hands, apparently, although I can't see them when I catch sight of him, alone in a meadow. But I recognise the contemplative look of a man deep in thought in the way one is when one loves one's garden.

I am swiftly and tactfully removed from his eyeline (visits usually take place only when Prince Charles is not in residence) and propelled into the walled azalea walk. There the life of Tigga the Jack Russell is eloquently remembered with a sculpture curled into a wall above a tended rectangle of grass yellow with primroses. There is a sense of freedom here. There's a lightness of touch in the fairytale follies, in a vast topiary toad and snail, a feeling that a man's passion for gardening has been given free rein.

I like the stumpery, the crude piles of tree stumps that define a woodland area and provide a lush raised home for ferns and hostas. And, magnificent as photographs are, they don't do these gardens justice. No, you have to walk round them, move from room to room with their different moods and palettes, to begin to understand what the Prince of Wales has created here. The aim, it is clear, is not to show off but to please, to provide a retreat that satisfies the soul.

You can imagine him on a fine summer day strolling down the steps from the house to the terrace, checking the birdcages, wandering through a gate into a meadow, and looking towards Tetbury or down the avenue of limes that leads to an iron column reclaimed from Victoria station. Or perhaps he heads for the secluded woodland enclosure that houses two temples and, in one of them, two donated leprechauns - which have to be the royal version of

the garden gnome.