Prince Philip's little-known British first - and it took him 12 years to achieve his dream

was a man of many talents. As well as , he excelled in a variety of areas, from fishing to fine painting, carriage-driving to .

And he was also a dab hand in the , making it into the record books with one of his more surprising feats - although it took him 12 years to achieve. After many fruitless years of trying to coax at Sandringham, Philip became the first person in Britain to cultivate a successful crop.

According to , he began 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 repeatedly failed to find any of the fungi."

Philip was determined, however, having been told that was well-suited for truffles because of its alkaline soil. And he had been warned by Italian experts in 2010 that it might take until 2021 before the first crop could be harvested. And he finally succeeded. Adrian Cole, a director of Truffle UK, which supplied the trees, told the publication: "They have been highly successful. The majority have been the French Périgord black truffle, [which are] as good as you can get."

He further revealed that the original plan had been to sell the truffles to raise money to help run the estate; and had been managed by the Duke since 1952. And the crop was certainly worth a great deal - 100g of black truffles, sometimes referred to as “black diamonds”, costs about £200.

But, according to the expert, the first growth never left the estate. "From what I gather, none has been sold. They have gone to the house or ," he said. Asked about the size of the harvest, Mr Cole added: "You will never get that information out of a truffle plantation owner. They are very secretive about it." Philip was well-known for his boundless energy and kept up a great many of his hobbies well into later life. .

He got into the sport after retiring from the polo field at the age of 50, due to , and went on to represent the UK in three European and six carriage-driving championships. As president of the International Equestrian Federation from 1964 to 1986, he was also involved in defining many of the rules used for competitive carriage-driving.

Writing about in his 2004 book 30 Years On And Off The Box Seat, Philip – then 83 – said: "I'm getting old. My reactions are getting slower and my memory is unreliable. But, I have not lost the sheer pleasure of driving a team through the British countryside."