In June 2014 the future King of England dug a hole in a flowerbed at his London home and buried two jumpers. Four months later he dug them up again. They looked identical. One was pure merino wool. The other was a synthetic copy. Charles had them laid side by side in the soil at Clarence House in front of an audience, marked the spot, and left them there over the summer. In October the soil was turned back. The synthetic jumper came out whole. It was clean, white and untouched, as if it had gone in that morning. The wool one was a few threads clinging to the wire frame. The rest had rotted away and fed the roses. He had done another test the day before the burial. A wool jacket and a synthetic one were each set alight. The wool smouldered and went out. The synthetic went up like a torch. For 40 years this man was laughed at. He talked to his plants. He worried about soil. He wore the same patched tweed coat for decades. In 2004 he launched a campaign to get the British eating mutton again, on the grounds that an older sheep tastes better and gives the hill farmer something to sell. In 2010 he launched another, for wool, from a medieval barn, because the price of a fleece had fallen below the cost of shearing it. He was treated as an eccentric with too much land. Go back over that list. Soil, wool, mutton, old cloth that lasts, small farms, raw milk cheese. Every one of the causes he was mocked for has turned out to be right. He proved the simplest of them with a spade. One jumper went back to the earth, and the other will still be there when he is not.