After 12 fruitless years of trying to coax black truffles from the soil at Sandringham the Duke of Edinburgh has become the first person in Britain to cultivate a successful crop.
Prince Philip, 97, began the exercise in 2006, when he planted more than 300 £15 saplings impregnated with truffle spores on the royal estate in Norfolk. His attempts to create a truffière in the royal fruit farm, which already yields apples, gooseberries and blackcurrants (including some that go into Ribena), had become an annual joke as trained truffle dogs repeatedly failed to find any of the fungi.
The selling price of 100g of black truffles, sometimes referred to as “black diamonds”, is about £200.
Adrian Cole, a director of Truffle UK, which supplied the