The Duchess of Cornwall has said she experienced gardening woes during lockdown during a guest appearance on BBC Two’s Gardener’s World.
Camilla Parker Bowles, 74, told the show’s presenter Monty Don that mice and voles and destroyed her strawberries and feasted on the asparagus roots she had planted.
The royal spent lockdown with her husband Prince Charles, 72, in Highgrove, Gloucestershire.
Camilla’s gardening woes came in the form of pesky vermin who devoured parts of her vegetable garden.
On the rodents, she said: “I’m very lucky I’ve got a big vegetable garden, but you get the mice, the voles this year, all ate the asparagus roots and then they got into the strawberries, so you can never win, there’s always something.”
(Image: PA)
Presenter Don acknowledged the difficulties of protecting gardens from harmful wildlife, he advised: “I think you just have to accept that there are some things that are just not going to go for you this year, whatever it might be.”
During the pandemic rodent-based inquiries to the Royal Horticultural Society, of which the Queen is patron, rose dramatically and experts suggested this was due to the fact people were home to catch the vermin in the act.
(Image: BBC)
The Society said four species of mice and voles in particular tend to cause damage to gardens – the wood mouse, yellow-necked field mouse, bank vole and short-tailed vole.
The rise in rodent activity in British gardens could be owed to the warmer winters in recent years.
Whilst on a tour of Don’s garden in Herefordshire Camilla spoke of gardening during lockdown as a “spiritual experience”, a sentiment which many Brits shared during the pandemic.
(Image: PA)
She said: “I think gardens got people through Covid.
“They realised how special a garden was and what they could do with it, they could become inventive, even if they hadn’t before they could start growing vegetables.”
She added: ‘It was a sort of spiritual experience for them, they discovered a sort of affinity with the soil – you can go into a garden and you can completely lose yourself.
“You don’t have to think about anything else, you’re surrounded by nature, you’ve got birds singing, you’ve got bees buzzing about – there is something very healing about gardens.”
The green-fingered Royal plans to expand her woodland garden and grow her own bulbs and wildflower meadow in the future.
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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
