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Sparkling Royal Jewels From Around the World

Sundays with the Queen: The Queen Mother’s Hibiscus Brooch

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If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know that the Queen’s brooch collection is absolutely packed with sentimental and important pieces that belonged to her mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Today’s brooch is one that the Queen Mum received during her long widowhood, and that the Queen has begun to wear regularly since her mother’s death.

The Hibiscus Brooch, set with diamond and rubies, was given to the Queen Mother by the people of Australia in the 1950s. The hibiscus is an important flower in Australia — so important, in fact, that the nation even has an Australian Hibiscus Society. The brooch features two of these hibiscus flowers entwined. Above, in perhaps the most Aussie-themed photo of the Queen Mum ever taken, she wears the brooch while cradling a koala during her 1958 visit.

The brooch was inherited by the Queen after the Queen Mother’s death in 2002, but she didn’t wear the piece in public until four years later. The occasion was a significant one: Prince William’s passing out parade at Sandhurst.

Since then, the hibiscus has been a fairly regular part of the Queen’s brooch rotation, most often appearing when she wears red or pink outfits. 

Sundays with the Queen: The Four-Row Pearl Choker

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ADAM BUTLER/AFP via Getty Images

There’s nothing unusual about seeing the Queen wearing pearls. Indeed, she wears pearl and diamond earrings and a three-stranded pearl necklace at nearly every daytime engagement she attends. But one of the lesser-seen necklaces in her collection is the four-stranded pearl choker necklace with an unusual diamond clasp.

Leslie Field writes that the necklace was made “from pearls in [the Queen’s] collection.” The pearls were reportedly a gift from the Japanese government, possibly acquired during the 1970s, when she made a state visit to that nation. The necklace was constructed by Garrard. Field also speculates that the clasp of the necklace is large enough to accommodate an additional strand of pearls, should the Queen ever choose to make this a five-stranded choker.

PA Images/Alamy

In November 1982, the Queen famously loaned this choker to her new daughter-in-law, the Princess of Wales, to wear during a state visit from Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Diana donned the choker for a banquet at Hampton Court Palace, wearing it with Queen Mary’s Lover’s Knot Tiara and the enormous sapphire brooch given to her by the Queen Mother as a wedding present. (It’s also one of the few times Diana wore the sash of a chivalric order; she’s wearing the Order of the Crown, given to her by Queen Beatrix during this particular state visit.)

The Queen has also worn the choker for a tiara affairs, pairing it with Queen Alexandra’s Kokoshnik or the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland Tiara, as she did in Bangladesh in 1983.

Chris Jackson/WPA Pool/Getty Images

Today, the necklace has been loaned to the Duchess of Cambridge. She wore it for a party celebrating the Diamond Wedding Anniversary of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in November 2017. She also wore it for the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh in April 2021.

Sundays with the Queen: The Greville Peardrop Earrings

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The pair of diamond drop earrings from the Greville inheritance only include six individual diamonds: two triangle-esque studs, from which are suspended two emerald cut diamonds and two enormous pear-shaped drops. Those six diamonds, though, combine to pack a major, sparkling punch.

The earrings arrived in the Windsor collection in 1942, when they were bequeathed by the Hon. Mrs. Greville to the Queen Mother. They were some of the more recent additions to the Greville cache, having been made by Cartier in 1938.

The earrings are set in platinum, which surely helps to lighten the weight of the massive drop stones, which each weigh in at a little more than twenty carats.

The Queen Mother wore the earrings throughout her life, usually pairing them with the Boucheron tiara from the Greville inheritance. After her death in 2002, they were inherited by the Queen, who has worn them occasionally at formal events like state banquets.