BRITAIN’S burgeoning army of urban allotment holders have a royal champion – the Queen has ordered part of the Buckingham Palace gardens to be turned into an environmen-tally friendly vegetable patch. It is the first time the palace has grown kitchen produce since it took part in the “dig for victory” campaign during the second world war.

The Queen has had the 30ft by 12ft vegetable patch dug at the rear of the 40-acre gardens in an area known as the “yard bed”, previously used for growing summer flowers. No chemicals are used and the plot is irrigated from the palace borehole. The inauguration of the royal vegetable patch follows a similar idea by President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle. In March, they dug up 1,100 sq ft of the White House lawn to plant crops.

The Queen is at the forefront of a national grow-your-own movement as people look for cheap and healthy alternatives to supermarket food. The National Trust has begun a nationwide campaign to encourage landowners to lend spare plots to the public. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson, the London mayor, has announced a scheme to plant vegetables on rooftops and unused spaces around some of the capital’s most famous landmarks.

Some of the first vegetables planted on the Buckingham Palace patch have regal overtones. They include a rare climbing French bean called Blue Queen and a variety of the same vegetable known as Royal Red. Others in the garden include Northern Queen lettuces and tomato varieties such as Golden Queen, Queen of Hearts and White Queen.

Visiting dignitaries might want to try some of the others – Stuttgarter onions might appeal to Angela Merkel, the German leader, and Red Ace beetroot to Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister.

The Queen was shown round her new venture last week by Claire Midgley, the deputy gardens manager.

A palace spokeswoman said the Queen was a green gardener. She said: “No chemicals have been used to cultivate the allotment sites. Liquid seaweed has been used to feed the plants and garlic is being used to deter aphids. Like the rest of the garden, water from the palace borehole is used to irrigate the plants.

Everything grown will be eaten within the palace.” To mark the opening of the allotment, the palace has released pictures of the Queen and Princess Margaret harvesting dwarf beans at their allotment at Windsor castle in 1943.

The image was used to promote the wartime campaign for national self-sufficiency. Christopher Woodward, director of the Museum of Garden History in south London, which is holding an exhibition this autumn called The Good Life: 100 Years of Growing Your Own, said: “It’s a good idea for the Queen to start an allotment.

The whole thing about urban food is the zeitgeist. It is not about the quantity of food produced. “When people feel anxious, they want to grow vegetables. In the late 1970s, the waiting list for allotments increased by a factor of 16, but in the 1980s when people had money and shoulder pads they abandoned their allotments.” He added: “Everybody feels better when they put their fingers in the earth and nothing tastes better than a strawberry or tomato you have just picked.”

Sir Roy Strong, the historian who wrote a book on the royal gardens, said: “The Queen is in line with the times and should be greatly applauded, but the idea of Princess Margaret keeping an allotment would have been laughable.”

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