Camilla pays visit to the Garden Museum

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The Duchess, a passionate gardener who has planted fruit and vegetables in her outdoor space, now has a woodland garden that she hopes to develop too. The green-fingered royal, who alongside her husband Charles, Prince of Wales is a lover of nature, spoke of her gardening woe. She explained that rodents, in particular voles, had infiltrated and had devoured her strawberries and the asparagus roots she had planted.

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.”

The Duchess spoke of her gardening challenges in a guest appearance on the BBC Two programme, broadcast at 8pm today, where she tours Don’s garden Longmeadow in Herefordshire and even greets Nellie, one of his dogs with a tummy rub.

When referring to the damage she’s seen to her garden, Don offered his advice by saying: “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.”

She described gardening as a “spiritual experience” for many during the pandemic, highlighting the solace that outdoor spaces provided during numerous lockdown periods when the public were urged to stay home and limit social contact.

The Duchess emphasised the importance of gardening on people’s wellbeing during the pandemic.

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 commented on the ability to “lose yourself” in gardening and how people can discover “a sort of affinity with the soil”.

She said: “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 Duchess hopes to develop her woodland garden, stating that her plans are to “build that up more”.

She said: “I would love to put down swathes of bulbs, and I would also like to have a proper wildflower meadow.

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“At the moment I’ve got a bit, but the grass has sort of taken over and we’re going to have another go this year of planting more seeds, because I think, especially now, it’s ever more important to have these wildflowers – if we’re going to keep on attracting butterflies and bees.”

The gardening challenge facing the Duchess, is one that affects many, with the Royal Horticultural Society advising that four species of mice and voles can cause damage to gardens.

The culprits of the damage are the wood mouse, yellow-necked field mouse, bank vole and short-tailed vole.

The damage from the rodents had become more noticeable during lockdown, with experts suggesting that people were more likely to notice the signs because they were spending more time at home.

Normally little plant damage is noticed, and population levels of the rodents remain low but mice and voles can reproduce rapidly under good conditions, leading to population explosions and an influx in damage to plants.

Earlier this month, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge shared images of their daughter Princess Charlotte cradling Peacock and Red Admiral butterflies, as part of the Big Butterfly Count.

The scheme aims to assess the health of the environment by counting the amount and type of butterflies present in a given area to aid conservation science and research.

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