Queen jokes about ‘nudging’ King off garden museum patronage

The Queen has joked that she wants to “nudge” the King from his position as patron of the Garden Museum, which she admitted she could not resist visiting every time she was asked.

Her Majesty described the museum, on the south bank in central London, as “such a special place” as she made her third visit in just over 12 months.

She was visiting a new exhibition about the gardens of four leading female members of the Bloomsbury Set, including Virginia Woolf and her lover Vita Sackville-West.

The Queen praised the “wonderful” exhibition, which she said was “so important” because women gardeners were “quite often” eclipsed by men.

“I know my husband is the patron but I might have to nudge him,” she joked.

“I’d quite like to take that one away from him because it’s such a special place that every time I’m asked, I just have to come back again.”

The Gardening Bohemia exhibition focuses on writer Woolf and her garden at Monk’s House; her sister Vanessa Bell, the artist, whose garden and studio was at nearby Charleston; Vita Sackville-West, the garden designer and writer, and her gardens at Sissinghurst Castle; and Lady Ottoline Morrell, the arts patron and photographer who presided over Garsington Manor.

Speaking to an audience of gardeners and curators, the Queen said: “I think this wonderful exhibition celebrating women’s gardening is so important… I hope it attracts many visitors.

“I’m so glad that you are celebrating all the women who are these great gardeners because we do love gardening, as a gardener myself.

“It’s quite often the men who get celebrated and not the women, so I think you’re doing a brilliant job here by sharing what they do.”

The Queen, who is patron of the Charleston Trust which safeguards Charleston, in East Sussex, appeared particularly taken with a pair of colourful gardening boots that belonged to Lady Ottoline, loaned to the museum from Fashion Museum Bath.

“They are really beautiful, wonderful stitching. I’ll have the boots, they are really cool,” she said.

The Queen was introduced to Virginia Nicholson, the granddaughter of Vanessa Bell, who told her: “I used to go to parties at your great grandmother’s place in Florence!”

The Queen’s great-grandmother, Alice Keppel, was a mistress of Edward VII and had two daughters, Sonia and Violet, the latter a lover of Sackville-West.

She owned the magnificent Villa dell’Ombrellino in Florence, which was passed down through the generations before being sold by Camilla’s mother, Rosalind Shand, the daughter of Sonia Keppel, in 1972.

Shane Connolly, the royal florist who created the floral displays for the Coronation last May as well as those for Charles and Camilla’s 2005 wedding, was also at the museum alongside gardener Alan Titchmarsh, the president of the museum.

Mr Connolly, who picked flowers from his garden for a posy presented to the Queen, said of the King and Queen: “It’s lovely because they’re both gardeners so we’ve got the most amazing support – a patron who’s a gardener and his wife who comes to see us, so it’s absolutely fantastic.

“They get what this is about, and gardening is for everyone, it’s not just for people who’ve got big estates, they realise that and this is a facility for people to come and see the therapy that a garden provides.”

Titchmarsh said after the visit: “We would be very happy to have the Queen and the King as patron, either or both. We just love that she loves to come.”

Woolf wrote most of her best-known novels in a hut next to the apple orchard at Monk’s House, a 16th-century cottage in Rodmell, Sussex. The manuscript of her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, is among the items on display at the museum.

Woolf was a regular visitor to the colour-themed garden “rooms” at Sissinghurst, cultivated by Sackville-West, who had become her lover in the 1920s.

The gardens provided the stimulus for much of Sackville-West’s poetry and her garden writing.

Woolf also often visited Charleston, the nearby farmhouse and studio shared by her sister, Bell and her partner, fellow Bloomsbury group artist Duncan Grant. Designed in 1918 by the artist Roger Fry, it was filled with flowers which Bell and Grant loved to paint.

Meanwhile, Morrell considered Garsington Manor a kind of “theatre” for social gatherings, and during the First World War, it was used as a farm to provide work to conscientious objectors and pacifists. Many of the artists and writers who visited created work inspired by the house and its formal Italianate gardens, including Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, and John Nash.

The King has been the patron of the museum since December 2021.