Marie Antoinette's Garden

“So you like flowers?” Louis XVI said to his young queen. “Well, I have a bouquet for you—the Petit Trianon.” And so it was that Marie-Antoinette took over the splendid former residence of Madame de Pompadour, transforming the gardens into an enchanted landscape.
Élisabeth de Feydeau takes readers on a journey through Marie-Antoinette’s eighteenth-century estate: stroll in the queen’s footsteps through beds of hyacinth, buttercups, and anemones in the French Garden; follow winding paths among Judas trees in the English Garden; pass through conifers towards the Belvedere, where fabulous late night festivities were held; inhale the entrancing aromas of the shrubs surrounding the Temple of Love; enjoy the bountiful orchards and kitchen gardens of the Queen’s Hamlet; and linger among the wildflowers in the Wood of Solitude.
Using archival documents, Élisabeth de Feydeau recreates a fanciful herbarium, highlighting species that were newly discovered in Marie-Antoinette’s time, detailing the cosmetic or medicinal uses of many of the garden’s plants, and recounting vivid anecdotes from the royal court. The queen’s gardens are captured in eighty-three eighteenth-century botanical illustrations, including watercolors by Marie-Antoinette’s official court artist, the renowned botanist and painter Pierre Joseph Redouté.