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Disembarking at Windsor and Eton Central in July can be a little overwhelming. Passengers spill out into streets already thick with visitors clutching ice creams and souvenir bags, phones held aloft, every lens trained on Britain’s oldest occupied castle.
When I visited earlier this week, the Changing of the Guard was in full swing. As the clock struck 11am, the regimental band drummed and trumpeted its way through the crowds, scarlet tunics glowing against the warm sandstone. It all felt reassuringly theatrical. At Windsor, a little pomp feels entirely appropriate.
Leaving the crowds behind, I skirt past the Round Tower, vivid orange trumpets of Campsis radicans scrambling across ancient walls alongside cascades of lilac wisteria. My route continues east, through a part of Windsor Castle that few visitors have experienced. At the turn of a corner, the space opens out. Before me is a back garden unlike any other. Formal borders frame broad lawns and centuries-old sculpture, while the land falls away into the rolling green of the Berkshire countryside beyond. It is both grand and surprisingly intimate.
This is the newly renamed Venus Garden, formerly the East Terrace Garden. Secluded behind the castle’s eastern façade, it has remained largely closed to the public, serving instead as a private retreat for successive monarchs, from George IV to Elizabeth II and now the King. Until September 13, however, visitors can finally wander its paths.
Yew topiary, clipped into bulbous forms, lends the garden a quiet eccentricity, somewhere between the exuberance of Levens Hall and the playfulness of Great Dixter. Beyond, the newly planted borders sit within crisply defined parterres edged with low hedging, softened by generous drifts of nepeta alive with bees, towering white spires of veronicastrum, cerise echinaceas and ribbons of persicaria and geranium. It is formal gardening, yes, but with enough looseness to stop it ever feeling rigid.
The design may be new, and the planting the product of just 18 months of careful, considered transformation, but the garden itself is anything but. Its story stretches back some 1,000 years. “It began as a defensive ditch,” explains Dr Richard Williams, learning curator at the Royal Collection Trust. Long before pollinator-friendly borders and bronze sculpture moved in, this section of land formed part of Windsor Castle’s medieval defences.
During the Stuart Restoration in the 17th century, however, military necessity gave way to leisure. Charles II ordered the ditch to be levelled into three bowling greens, replacing fortification with recreation. Another transformation came under George IV in the early 19th century. Dissatisfied with the lack of privacy afforded by the castle, he remodelled the eastern side of Windsor into his own secluded retreat. As Williams puts it, George IV “constructed an English country house within a medieval castle”. Looking out from his newly created private apartments, he wanted something rather finer than neatly mown lawn. “You don’t want to be looking down on a bowling green,” he continues. “You want a beautiful garden, of course.”
It is a surprisingly relatable ambition. George IV simply wanted a better view from his drawing room. This pocket of Windsor, then, was born from the very same impulse that sends the rest of us to the garden centre on a Saturday morning.
Gardens, though, are never truly finished. They are places of continual growth, change, chaos and decay. George IV’s vision was dealt a severe blow when the devastating winter of 1837 destroyed much of the planting, prompting Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to redesign the garden. Later, during the Second World War, flower beds gave way to beans, tomatoes and sweetcorn as part of the Dig for Victory campaign, with the young Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret each tending their own vegetable plots. History does not record whether there was any sibling rivalry, but it’s easy to picture the two comparing the progress of their beans and onions over supper.
In 1971, the then Duke of Edinburgh swept away the Victorian planting in favour of a formal rose garden centred on a bronze lotus fountain. Many of the roses were selected as much for their perfume as their colour, with blooms regularly cut for state banquets.
King Charles III’s Venus Garden, then, is simply the latest chapter in a landscape that has continually evolved to reflect the tastes, priorities and personalities of successive monarchs. Yet this latest incarnation comes with a philosophy all of its own. Williams explains that, viewed from Earth during an eight-year cycle, the planet Venus appears to trace a remarkable five-petalled figure across the night sky. The pattern, observed for centuries and famously illustrated by Johannes Kepler, has become known as the Venusian flower.
It is an idea the King explored in his 2010 book, Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, in which he considers humanity’s relationship with architecture, agriculture and nature. That philosophy did not remain on the page. The Venus Garden was created at the King’s request, and he remained closely involved throughout the redesign alongside the royal household’s gardens team, supported by specialist designers and contractors.
“The five-petal shape can be found throughout the natural world, from the microscopic level to the planetary,” Williams says. “You see it repeated in great architecture too, in temples and churches across cultures and across history. The thinking is that when human beings create something beautiful, it resonates because it echoes patterns that already exist in nature. It reminds us that we are connected to the natural world, not separate from it.”
Passengers descending into Heathrow are afforded perhaps the finest view of the garden’s geometry, the five-petalled rosette visible in dark green of yew set against the clipped lawns. From the rear staircase of the East Front, however, the design is just as apparent, the parterres translating an abstract idea into a very tangible landscape.
For all the novelty of the King’s vision, there is continuity in the Venus Garden, too. The centuries-old yew topiary still anchors the garden, while gnarled rosemary spills from lead planters bearing the cypher of Charles II. Mature wisteria clambers across the walls, while new avenues of ornamental pear sit comfortably alongside crab apples, dogwoods, hornbeam, parrotia, catalpa and richly coloured acers, promising blossom in spring, cooling shade in summer and autumn fireworks.
Continuity is also evident in the sculpture. George IV understood that a royal garden should be as much an outdoor gallery as a place of retreat, assembling one of Britain’s finest collections of bronze sculpture. Four figures by Hubert Le Sueur, cast for Charles I in the early 17th century, still punctuate the garden today. I found myself repeatedly drawn back to the Borghese Gladiator, left arm outstretched, sword poised in his right hand, a bronze cast of the celebrated ancient sculpture discovered in Rome in 1611 and now housed in the Louvre.
The fountain, too, remains the garden’s natural focal point, as it has for generations. Before long, it will once again be crowned by François-Joseph Bosio’s dramatic bronze Hercules and Acheloüs, depicting the hero wrestling the river god in the form of a serpent. It is difficult to imagine a more fitting (or dramatic) centrepiece for the space. Commissioned by George IV in 1829, the sculpture stood here for well over a century before being lent first to Hampton Court and later to Kew Gardens. Its return is less a new installation than a coming home.
Williams tells me that one of the first things that struck him on joining the Royal Collection was how little within it ever truly stands still. Paintings move between palaces. Furniture is relocated. Fireplaces find new homes. Garden sculpture, too, follows its own journey. “The garden may be newly redesigned,” he says, “but those layers of history are still here. Every generation has left something behind, and the sculpture is part of that story.”
Among the statuary and Venusian beds, long-flowering Verbena bonariensis dances in the breeze, while lime-green froth from Alchemilla mollis catches the light, echoed by the fresh green tips of yew. Perovskia lends the planting a soft purple haze, cooled by silvery drifts of artemisia, sea holly and thistles. It is a planting palette chosen not simply for beauty, but for resilience: species capable of withstanding hotter, drier summers while providing nectar from spring well into autumn.
Beneath Chester Tower, one border in particular draws me in. Simple single white roses, each flower little more than five pale petals surrounding a honey-gold eye, perhaps another quiet echo of the Venus motif. Nearby, peach-toned shrub roses mingle with mature wisteria, while spent allium seed heads, their purple long since faded, remain as handsome bronze globes among the planting. Hoverflies drift lazily between the flowers. Bumblebees disappear into the borders. Then, almost on cue, a vivid blue dragonfly pauses for a beat before darting away across the beds.
For a garden inspired by philosophies of harmony, it is difficult to imagine a more fitting seal of approval. I linger for a while on the East Front steps before returning to the crowds beyond the castle walls, reluctant to leave what may well be Britain’s greatest back garden behind.
The Garden Through Time, by Thomas Rutter (Hachette, £20), brings 45 of history’s greatest gardens to life in rich storytelling and illustration. It is available to order via Telegraph Books.
