Royal Watch News

Queen Elizabeth turns off heating

Jan 4, 2013, 12:01 GMT

Queen Elizabeth

Britain's Queen Elizabeth has turned off the heating in the greenhouses on her Sandringham estate.

The 86-year-old monarch has decided the glasshouses on the estate in Norfolk, East Anglia, are too expensive to heat and instead of growing on bedding plants she will buy in fully-grown flowers from nurseries because it is now more 'cost-effective'.

Her head gardener Martin Woods told The Daily Mail newspaper: 'We're growing a bit, but not as much as we have done in the past.

'We have a large area of glass and have scaled down. With heating costing so much, we can't carry on without it, so we are reviewing how much to grow without so much heat. It's not cost-effective for us.

'It costs a fortune to heat greenhouses these days and it's much cheaper to buy the plants fully-grown because commercial nurseries operate on an enormous scale and can absorb the extra heating costs.'

The queen's privately-owned estate has two greenhouses for carnations and others for crysanthemums and dahlias, but most will be mothballed this year, with only a small heated area retained for houseplants and a few other select specimens.