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City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
Celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of HM Queen
Elizabeth II by visiting The Royal Landscape
- a thousand acres of gardens, lakes and
woodlands at the southern end of Windsor
Great Park.
The Royal Landscape is within easy access from
the M25, M3 & M4, there are some example
mileages on the map opposite. For example it is
just under fifty miles from Stevenage and just over
fifty miles from Dartford with Croydon and towns
in the Hemel Hempstead area just 30 or so miles
away.
The Savill Building is the gateway to the Royal
Landscape. This is an award winning building
with a curved and undulating roof covering a vast
cathedral like space. The roof is designed to
blend with the surrounding landscape and just six
years after it was built it does just that and it does
it beautifully. Inside The Savill Building there is a
self service restaurant and a coffee bar come art
gallery plus a shop selling rather lovely giftware
alongside books and fine foods. Out on the
terrace (a super sunny spot for lunch ) is a
nursery selling plants that are quite literally fit
for a queen. For The Savill Building looks out
onto The Savill Garden.
Created in the 1930s by Sir Eric Savill with the
support of King George V and Queen Mary this
is best known as one of Britain’s greatest
ornamental woodland gardens and in recent
years it has become so much more.
Last July I took a walk around the new Rose
Garden with Harvey Stephens Head of The
Savill Garden. Designed to break the mould
of traditional rose gardens Harvey explained
to me how they set out to create something
truly memorable for visitors and how this
ambition led to exploring the strong links
between fragrance and memory which
ultimately resulted in building a sculpturally
beautiful bridge walkway out into and above
the mass of colour that is the rose garden
so that as we walk out above the garden the
perfume rises up in the warm air to meet us.
The roses have been selected by Harvey on
the basis of perfume, colour, repeat flowering
and vigour. The Rose Garden’s curves and
interlocking crescents create a journey towards
the centre of the Garden, emphasised by the
way in which the roses have been planted.
The palette of colours radiate out from an
intense centre of deep plum purple through soft
pinks fading to white and subtle apricots to
tangerine orange where the Garden meets the
vibrant herbaceous borders. The use of repeat
flowering roses means that the Garden will look
splendid from mid-June through to September.
Bring a digital camera on a summer day out
in the Royal Landscape and create a lasting
Diamond Jubilee memento for your
members with a group photograph on the
bridge over the Royal Rose Garden.
A Day in the Royal Landscape