NEED TO KNOW
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King Charles has taken part in a podcast with Cate Blanchett
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It is the King’s second podcast appearance of the year, following his choice of favorite music in April
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The chat with Blanchett, who also supports Prince William’s Earthshot Prize, highlights a key environmental concern and showcases the Millennium Seed Bank
King Charles and Cate Blanchett are teaming up for an important chat.
The Oscar-winning star, 56, sat down with King Charles, 76, to celebrate the world-renowned and innovative seed bank and its crucial role in preserving nature.
The Millennium Seek Bank was set up 25 years ago to save them before they’re wiped out by climate and environmental pressures.
For the King, it is his second podcast appearance of the year, after he unveiled some of his favorite songs in a special for Apple Music in March.
And for Blanchett, who has been involved with Prince William‘s Earthshot Prize since its inception, it represented a new involvement with a member of the royal family.
Chris Jackson/Getty
King Charles taking part in the podcast at Windsor Castle in July, 2025
The podcast, called Unearthed, is from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which runs the seed bank in Wakehurst, Sussex. Blanchett was joined by Kew’s senior research leader in seed conservation, Dr. Elinor Breman, in a sunlight corner of Windsor in July.
“The future of life on Earth may very well depend on the seeds stored within this bank,” Blanchett says in her introduction.
At the heart of the mission is to ensure nature’s biodiversity is kept for future generations and the long-term health of the planet.
Blanchett, who is ambassador for Wakehurst, says in the podcast, “There is an urgency to the work that the seed bank does. I was shocked to learn that 97 % of the wildflower meadows have been decimated. I don’t think it’s something that we quite understand here, because we look around us and in the immediate term, we see so much natural beauty. But we don’t think how fragile it is.”
Chris Jackson/Getty
King Charles taking part in the podcast in July 2025
In the 22-minute conversation, the King spoke about one of his initiatives, undertaken to commemorate the coronation of his late mother Queen Elizabeth, called the Coronation Meadows.
“I thought it was a good excuse because I knew about the real damage that has been done to all our flower-rich meadows since the war, really,” he says.
When Blanchett says, “Really in that short a space of time,” Charles adds it was “absolutely incredible.”
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Cate Blanchett, Dr. Elinor Breman and King Charles around the table at Windsor in July 2025
“Because what you can destroy in one day by just ploughing it up takes practically a hundred years to replace, and it requires constant management, the same management to create this remarkable diversity.” He says that he’s seen it on his regular travels to Transylvania, Romania (he usually goes once a year), “where it’s even more unbelievable.”
There, he says, rescuing meadows “before they get destroyed because they’re unique,” and reflect what meadows and fields were like in his home country “in the medieval times.” Preserved well, in this way, they are home to “something like 17 or 18 different species of orchid,” he suggests.
Their conversation moves on to whether the pharmaceutical industry could do more to preserve the health of plants as so many drugs and medicines come from the botanical world. King Charles suggested it was “surely their interest to invest in the protection and enhancement and restoration of this biodiversity” from which so many treatments have been derived.
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King Charles makes his point during the recording of the podcast in Windsor in July 2025
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Echoing Prince William’s mission via the Earthshot Prize to find solutions that can have a positive effect on climate change and other challenges and to fund them accordingly, Blanchett says she is frustrated that “there’s so many extraordinary initiatives right there ready to be scaled up. There’s a willingness there, but there’s just, there’s not the direction of the funds.”
King Charles adds, “And there’s that lack of awareness too, as you were saying about the actual detail of all these things.”
Read the original article on People