Plants, flowers, and trees were Marie-Antoinette’s great passion. At the Petit Trianon, she created an enchanted refuge from the formalities of Versailles — a garden of hyacinths and anemones, winding Anglo-Chinese paths, fragrant shrubs surrounding the Temple of Love, and wildflowers in the Garden of Solitude.

This lavishly illustrated hardback meanders through her estate as the queen herself would have walked it, drawing on archival documents to reconstruct the gardens in exquisite detail. Accompanied by eighteenth-century botanical watercolours from Pierre-Joseph Redoné and his contemporaries, it weaves together descriptions of the cosmetic and medicinal uses of each plant, anecdotes from the royal court, and the quiet beauty of the herbarium.

A book to be read slowly, and kept close.

240 pages · 235 × 185mm · ISBN 9782080482433