THERE can't be too many Worcestershire landowners, let alone local Conservative Association chairmen, who have slept rough on the streets of Paris, but then Charles Hudson is not your average squire.

Now supplier of organic confetti to the weddings of the rich and famous - and you don't get much more of either than Charles and Camilla, Catherine and Michael (Zeeta-Jones and Douglas, that is) and Madonna and Guy Ritchie - he should, perhaps, really have been born a Cavalier. Or maybe a musketeer. Porthos, Aramis and Hudson. He certainly has the hair.

Beneath the unruly shock of locks is a wonderfully Bohemian character who was quite at home in France teaching piano (which he can play), trumpet (which he can't) and guitar ("I know a few chords") to a sympathetic French family, when his grandmother died in the early 1970s and the call of family duty brought him home to England to superintend the Hudson estate at Wick, near Pershore.

It is somewhat appropriate, as well a damning indictment on the state of British agriculture, that the confetti business, which only occupies 12 acres of flowers, now turns over as much money as the rest of the farm's 1,600 acres combined. Appropriate, because you could never imagine him surviving by growing onions or potatoes. Far too colourful for that.

Despite all the inherited ancient space that now surrounds him at Wyke Manor - which nearly burnt down a few years ago when he left a convex paper weight on top of some papers in a sunny window seat - Charles Hudson grew up in a little cottage on a family farm near Bath.

"The rooms were tiny," he recalled. "When it came to bedtime, the children were stacked on top of each other."

Sent away to boarding school, he hated it. "It's criminal sending children away like that and incarcerating them like some sort of prisoners of war. You're told you'll get used to it. You cry, but no one listens and eventually you just give up." Despite his distaste for the public school system, Charles, who is now married to writer Cressida Connolly, was destined for Oxford University.

But for a variety of reasons, mainly indecision over which courses he should study - he preferred the arts, others urged something more practical - he never made it and in a fit of rebellion went off to live with a friend in Paris. "It wasn't really a flat, it was a room about 8ft by 6ft. The idea was that he would sleep there at night and I would sleep there during the day when he was out at work."

Unfortunately, the landlady soon twigged the scam and after three days he was thrown out.

For the next couple of months he lived rough on the streets of the French capital.

"I hadn't got a brass farthing, so I couldn't buy anything and I didn't dare ask my family for any money. You soon learn the warmest place to sleep is the Metro. When they close that you just walk round and round until they open it again. In France, if you sit down at a cafe table, they bring you a bowl of bread while you're waiting to order your meal. So I used to eat the bread and then quickly leave before the waitress came back."

But sitting on a park bench one day reading an abandoned copy of the International Herald Tribune, his luck changed. He saw an advert for someone to teach English to a young French family with a son and daughter. "Unfortunately, the interview was at Le Vesigne, which was about 15 miles away and as I couldn't afford any fare, I had to walk, carrying a rather heavy suitcase containing my smart clothes. When I was near the house, I hid in some bushes to change."

The job paid £300 a month, but the catch was it also involved teaching musical instruments, one of which, the trumpet, he had no idea how to play.

The subterfuge lasted only a few weeks until the father walked into a room unexpectedly as Charles was giving a trumpet "lesson" to the little boy.

"He asked me to show his son how to do it and there was no escape. So I pursed my lips, blew and this burping noise came out. At that point I had to confess I couldn't play the trumpet.

"But he was very good. He laughed, said the children liked me and I could stay anyway. This allowed me to save up some money and after about four months I managed to get on a course at the Sorbonne. The family even waved me off when I left."

But his studies had hardly begun before news arrived from England that his grandmother, who had been living in Wyke Manor, had died and the decent thing would be to return to put the estate in order.

"It's amazing what a sense of history and duty you feel at a time like that, so I had no option really. I probably thought I was far too Bohemian to be a farmer, but it was something I felt I had to do."

What Charles found was an estate severely run down. At that time in the mid Seventies, it covered only 170 acres and included 14 cottages, one of which still had an earth floor and outside closet. By sheer hard work, entrepreneurial spirit and continual re-investment of profits, he has turned the estate around and once more made it the centre of the community. His stroke of genius, however, has been the organic confetti. An old coach house has been converted to house the business and now Real Flower Petal Confetti is sold via the internet and exported all over the world.

When Sir Gerald Nabarro, the flamboyant South Worcestershire MP, died in 1974, the Conservatives were looking to replace him with young blood and Charles Hudson made the shortlist, only to be beaten by Sir Michael Spicer. Charles settled for chairmanship of the constituency association some time later.

"Probably a good job," he said. "I'm not sure I would have made a good politician." But wouldn't it have been fun finding out.