Crown Princess Margareta and the garden of Sofiero

The inscription reads: “To Daisy from GanGan 1890”. Maybe Margaret of Connaught was always destined to be an influential gardener – the eight-year-old’s gift was four leatherbound volumes of “Familiar Wild Flowers”. And GanGan? That was her grandmother, Queen Victoria.

Margaret, who was called ‘Daisy’ as a child, grew up at Bagshot Park in Sussex. She went on to become Crown Princess of Sweden, to be hugely influential on gardens there, and to have a rose named after her many years later by David Austin. But her romance with Sweden very nearly didn’t happen.

Bride hunting

Sweden’s Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf – later King Gustaf VI Adolf – set off on a tour of Europe’s royal families in 1904 to find a bride. Apparently unsuccessful, it was rumoured in the London Evening Standard that he might settle for a President’s daughter instead. Miss Alice Roosevelt.

Reading newspapers of the time, it’s interesting to see just how many royal families there were in Europe. And how obsessed the press was with them. You only had to be a Duke with a heavy cold to find it reported. Start looking for a spouse and you would send matchmaking journalists into euphoria.

So when at the start of the following year Margaret and her sister went on their own tour, it sparked more breathless marriage speculation. Journalists followed them from Lisbon, to the Mediterranean and to Egypt. As the author of the syndicated ‘Society Gossip’ column sanctimoniously wrote at the end of January:

Several of my contemporaries are feverishly anxious to see Princess Margaret of Connaught married. The Princess has been betrothed by the press during the last few months to numerous Princes, including the King of Spain, the Crown Prince of Portugal, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and Prince George of Hannover. The latest report on the subject is that a marriage is to be arranged between Princess Margaret and Prince Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Norway, eldest son of the Crown Prince. The couple with whose names such liberties are taken have never yet met, and it has been for some time well known at several European Courts that a marriage is contemplated between Prince Gustavus Adolphus and Princess Olga of Hanover, third daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland.

A castle and enchanted forest

Wrong! Margaret and her family arrived in Cairo soon after and there she finally met the Swede. The two fell in love and he proposed while still in Cairo. They married at Windsor Castle in England in June. The Swedish king, Oscar II, gave them a beautiful wedding present – his summer castle, Sofiero. Her own parents gave her a £25,000 marriage settlement that would be worth about £3.9m in today’s money. They also threw in a spectacular tiara with diamonds set in the form of loops of forget-me-not flowers.

When the couple reached Helsingborg, locals threw daisies over their carriage as they rode from the station to their new home.

Margaret – or Margareta as she became known in Sweden – began transforming the park immediately. She said: “The whole place gave one the impression of being the enchanted forest where the fairy-tale princess still slept.” Enchanting it may have been, but she wanted more, and she was happy to get her hands dirty helping to change it herself.

Flower walk

First, she laid out a flower walk. Her husband designed a water well made of a local red limestone to adorn it, which still stands today. At the end of the flower walk they built a small cottage for the head gardener in local traditional style. This also still exists. Close to the castle the beds were planted with perennials and summer flowers in squares – hot colours closest, blueish, cool colours in the distance as Gertrude Jekyll had taught.

On the crossing path to the east she planted pear trees, alternating with roses, each trained over a bower, creating a tunnel over the path.

Margaret wrote two influential books about gardening – “Our garden at Sofiero” and “From the flower garden”. She illustrated these with her own paintings and photographs. During the First World War she used her knowledge of gardening to help train other women to work on the land.

She and Gustaf Adolf had five children. The first-born, Gustaf Adolf, who died young, became the father of Sweden’s current king, Karl XVI Gustaf.

Early death

Sadly, she too, died before her time, not living long enough to become queen. On 1 May 1920 she died of sepsis following an ear operation. She was only 38 and eight months’ pregnant with her sixth child. She was buried in a coffin made of English oak.

Swedish garden writer Christel Kant describes her legacy as “immense”. She says: “At the turn of the 20^th century gardening was not as popular in Sweden as it was in England and she was keen to share her enthusiasm. She had an enormous influence on garden culture in the country. She advised friends, helping them design their gardens and created a flower gate at an exhibition in a park in Malmö.”

Her influence on her husband was enduring, too. He retained the interest in gardening she inspired, with a particular passion for rhododendrons. He planted more than 5,000 seedlings, mostly growing in the ravines that run north and south of the castle. A walkway over these today is quite something.

David Austin

In 1999, English rose breeder David Austin named a beautiful apricot-orange climber after her. ‘Crown Princess Margareta’ has since been retired from the Austin collection, but the Princess’s memory lives on at Sofiero.

This is a stunning garden today – loved for its beauty and for the gifted couple who created it and well worth a visit.