Honey helps to sweeten link with the US

The collection of gifts included jewellery, pony bits and even a jar of honey.

The two heads of state, and their spouses, gave each other specially bound books, with Mr Obama receiving facsimiles of Royal Archive letters sent between Queen Victoria and a succession of American presidents.

It begins with correspondence from John Quincy Adams writing to Princess Victoria in 1834, three years before she became monarch, and the final letter in the collection was penned by William McKinley in 1897 to the ageing sovereign to mark her Diamond Jubilee year.

The volume, bound in red leather and housed in a presentation box, includes letters and watercolours covering the Prince of Wales’s US trip in 1860 and letters in response to the death of the Prince Consort and Abraham Lincoln.

The Queen received a handmade leather-bound album containing rare memorabilia and photographs that detail the trip of her parents – George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother – to America in 1939, the first by a reigning British monarch.

When in doubt about what present to give a woman jewellery is a welcome choice.

So from the Monarch and the Duke of Edinburgh the First Lady received an antique gold and red coral brooch in the form of roses, presented in a jewel box covered in the same red leather as her husband’s book.

Mrs Obama has been hailed as the most stylish president’s wife since Jackie Kennedy.

Philip, who until recent years was a competitive carriage driver, was given a custom-made set of Fell Pony bits and shanks, as well as horseshoes worn by the recently retired champion carriage horse Jamaica.

Designed in Colorado and made in Ohio, the set includes several interchangeable bits and each shank is engraved with the Presidential seal.

Jamaica was a slaughterhouse rescue animal who rose to the top of the competitive carriage horse world and was named the 2008 United States Equestrian Federation Horse of the Year.

The Obamas gave the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, both keen gardeners, a special selection of plants, seedlings and seeds from the South Lawn of the White House and the gardens from two estates in Virginia owned by former US presidents, Monticello, the former home of Thomas Jefferson, and Mount Vernon where George Washington lived for nearly 50 years.

It also included a present for those with a sweet tooth – jars of honey from the White House beehive.