Ahead of the unveiling ceremony, the Sunken Garden has been redesigned to ‘compliment’ the statue of the Princess of Wales. In a statement shared with Harper’s Bazaar, the palace revealed that the garden has been replanted with more than 4,000 of Diana’s favorite flowers including forget-me-nots, roses, tulips, lavender, dahlias and sweet peas. It took palace gardeners over 1,000 hours to transform the space into a “calmer and more reflecting setting for the statue,” which includes deeper, more streamlined flowerbeds and a more open lawn space around the rectangular pond. Garden designer Pip Morrison said, “This has been a very special project to work on, as the Sunken Garden was a favorite place of Diana, Princess of Wales. “We have worked carefully to ensure that the new layout and planting scheme compliments the statue, providing a calming place for people who visit Kensington Palace to remember the princess.” In 2017, the Sunken Garden was redesigned as the ‘White Garden’ to mark 20 years since Diana’s death in a car crash in 1997. Inspired by her wardrobe, it was planted with white flowers, with head gardener Sean Harkin citing the princess’s famous photoshoot with Mario Testino the year she died as an example of an inspiring influence for the white theme. “In some of those photos, she’s either wearing white or cream. Or even the ones [in which] she’s not, there’s even a kind…of very radiant, uplifting feeling from those photographs and is very natural,” he said. “The feeling you get from that room is the feeling that we wanted people to get from the plants in the garden.” There were white lilies because Diana loved to decorate her apartment at Kensington Palace with them; forget-me-nots to represent the bittersweet pain of her passing; and white roses because “I think lots of people would refer to Princess Diana as the classic English rose,” Harkin said. 2017 was also when Diana’s sons announced that they had commissioned a statue in honor of the Princess of Wales. Four years later, they will finally attend its unveiling later today, when members of the Spencer family and some of Diana’s friends will join William and Harry to remember the woman who would have turned 60 today. Next up, Princess Diana’s Legacy of Kindness
