The garden just won a gold medal at the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show.
Kate Middleton’s Back to Nature space may have won the royal seal of approval with a visit from Queen Elizabeth on Monday, but there is another garden at the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show with a regal connection — for a good cause.
The Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED), which has become closely associated with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, won a gold medal for its garden at the show.
(Kate’s garden was not entered, as is customary for collaboration with the organizers the Royal Horticultural Society).
Designer Jilyayne Rickards based her garden on the story of a girl named Beauty, from rural Zimbabwe, whose parents died when she was 14. As the eldest in the family, she was left to raise her six siblings. At the back of the garden is a schoolroom, complete with typical traditional board games made from wood and beans used as counters, with vegetables like pumpkin, aubergine and okra growing in the red soil which was used to conjure up the look of Zimbabwe’s ground and signify the work that Beauty had to do to help support her family.
“Beauty had to drop out of school and set up on her own to grow her crops,” Rickards says. “But she was helped by CAMFED to support her in education and set up her farming business. It enabled her and her brothers and sisters to be lifted out of poverty.”
“I wanted to capture that positive message and the vibrant energy of Zimbabwe’s people.”
Harry, 34, and Meghan, 37 are aware of the garden through the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust – of which they are both president and vice president, respectively.
On International Women’s Day earlier this year, Angie Murimirwa, executive director of CAMFED, was among those joining Meghan on a panel discussion. And Harry took up the campaign in Africa when he visited with CAMFED in Zambia last November.
CAMFED’s goal is to raise $265,000 to help reach 30,000 “invisible” girls – those who don’t show up on official records of any kind – and start the process of getting them into school. That is “my call to action,” Murimirwa says.