Don’t have a garden? You can make your own miniature garden at home.
Princess Mary was a keen gardener and enjoyed maintaining and developing her own areas of the gardens at Harewood, in particularly the Himalayan Garden and her beloved rockery.
Her love for gardens was such that she built up a small collection of miniature flower ornaments. Some of these are made by Beatrice Hindley, a miniaturist in the 1920s who was commissioned to make all the plants for Queen Mary’s Dolls House at Windsor Castle. It is quite likely that some of Princess Mary’s models were originally made for this purpose.
Hindley’s models are remarkably lifelike and delicate, having spent time experimenting with different metal alloys and surface paints, as well as studying real plant specimens at Kew. There is a small display in Princess Mary’s Garden Room Below Stairs at Harewood.
To bring National Gardening Week to life, Technician Roger Stark created a version of a bowl garden (top) and an activity with his daughter.