In gardens crafted by Kings to display most decadently their love for a Queen – or merely to declare their majesty to the wider world – she flits. From city to city, nation to nation, aloft on the whispering winds of Wonderful.
In Southern Italy, she peers along the fountain before the Fontana Margherita. There it stands, the Royal Palace of Caserta, beyond the waters that may as well stretch eternal. Within that immortal alley of parterres, the stone figures about the fountain seem almost to turn and bow to her beauty.
Skipping north to Versailles, to the gardens that Louis XIV did consider every bit as grand and vital as the palace itself, she finds a new fountain to sit by. Lantona’s it once was, inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
To Brussels she larks, wandering wilfully into the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken, where beneath its geometric glass sky she is transported back to the time of its creation. She can see the royal architect of Leopold – that Alphonse Balat – lost in thoughts on how to unify such an impossible structure. The Ideal Glass Palace – she does not envy his mammoth task, yet evidently he did well.
Wherever she goes, she seeks out gardens first. They represent to her the fountain of youth and natural sprouting of knowledge in all things. Unfurling her finger as a fern, she signals points of interest to her own eye. Fibonacci, she posits, was onto something.
In each remarkable Royal Gardens – so illustrious to represent the majesty of a nation to citizen and visitor alike – she knows there to be a fragile core. A nucleus of knowing, an everlasting entity of the mind behind the masterpiece.
Just as the creator of the Royal Garden is not the monarch but the mind he employs, so is the body a result of the child that grew into it. Each woman did grow from a girl, a girl who instilled in that woman all that she is and may one day still grow to be.
Wonderful – because you’re nothing less.
