Tradescant bowed, thinking that she had just said enough to get both of them hanged if the king applied the laws of the land – which he manifestly only did when it suited him.

“And I shall want flowers for my chapel, for my private chapel,” she said. “Blue and white for Our Lady.”

“Of course, Your Majesty.”

“And for my private rooms, and strewing herbs, and the king wishes you to maintain and replant the physic garden and look at the herb garden.”

Tradescant bowed again.

“I want the house to be like a palace in a fairy tale,” she said, changing at once from the evangelical Roman Catholic into the flirtatious queen. “Like a bower for a fairy-tale Princess. I want people all over the country, all over Europe, to hear of it as a fairy-tale garden, a perfect garden. Have you heard of the Platonic ideal?”

John felt a sense of weariness he had never before known while talking about a garden. He had a sudden sympathy for the king, who had lost the easy male companionship of Buckingham and had no one to turn to but this vain woman.

The queen was laughing. “I suppose not!” she cried. “It does not matter, Gardener Tradescant. It is an idea which we make much of at court, in our masques and poetry and plays. I will just tell you that it is an idea that there is a perfect form of everything – of a woman, of a man, of a marriage, of a garden, of a rose, and the king and I want to attain that ideal.”

John glanced at her to see if she was speaking seriously. He thought of how the duke would have roared with laughter at the pedantry, at the pretentiousness. He would have slapped John on the back and called him Gardener Tradescant forever after.

“Think of it,” she said, her voice as sweet as syrup. “A perfect garden as a shell for a perfect palace for a perfect king and queen.”

“In a perfect country?” John asked incautiously.

She smiled. She had no sense that there might be anything behind his question but spellbound admiration. “Oh, yes,” she said. “How could it be otherwise when it is ruled by my husband, and by me?”

Summer 1631

John had thought he would enjoy some time away from his home – never in his life before had he been so settled and he feared that the domestic life of Lambeth would be too narrow for him. But he found that he missed the daily changing business of the Ark, the midsummer flowering of the garden and, more than anything else, the rapid changing of Frances, who grew, in the summer of 1631, from a rosebud-mouthed, lisping toddler to a little girl of rare determination.

He went home to Lambeth at every opportunity he could, to choose his stock from his own garden, and so that he could see his granddaughter. Each time he set off back to the palace, J would loiter in the stable yard, helping to pack the wagon with the heavy earthenware pots of plants.

“D’you need me at the palace?” he would ask, and John would drop his hand on his son’s shoulder.

“I can manage without you another week,” he would say. “I’ll tell you when I need you there.”

“I’ll come then,” J would promise. “As I agreed to.”

He would watch his father swing into the seat and go, and John would chuckle to himself at the seriousness of his beloved son who had bound himself in so many contradictory ways: to his conscience, to his promise, to his father, to his wife.

By the end of the summer John had completed the designs for the work in the king’s court, had shown them to the queen and was ready to start the labor of digging over the garden and replanting it. He had a team of men ready to start but he needed J to supervise the work while he went on to the queen’s court, so that it should be designed in time for autumn planting.

“Will you come back to the palace with me this time, J?” he asked as the family were seated on the terrace one evening. J was drinking a glass of small ale; John had a small tot of rum. “There’s the physic garden which needs replanting, and now the queen has asked for a flowery mead.”

Jane looked up from her sewing, affronted. “A what?”

John smiled. “A flowery mead,” he said. “Modeled on an old tapestry, those you see with the unicorn surrounded by hunters. It’s supposed to be like a meadow, a perfect meadow, with all the flowers of the field but no stinging nettles. You plant it with wild and garden flowers and then you cut a little path around it for the pleasure of walking with wildflowers.”

“Why not walk by a meadow, then?” Jane asked.

John took another sip of rum. “This is not a woman of sense, this is the queen. She would rather that everything was fashioned to perfection. Even a wildflower meadow. It’s an old fashion in gardening; I did not think to plant one again. And although it is supposed to look wild and untouched, it takes unending work to keep it in flower and keep the weeds checked.”

“I can do it,” J said. “I’ve never worked on one before. I’d like to do it.”

John raised his glass to his son. “And you’ll have little or nothing to do with Her Majesty,” he said. “Since she first showed me the garden and told me what she wanted I have hardly seen her. She is with the king most of the day or with the courtiers. She wants the garden as the backcloth to her theater of being queen. She has no interest in planting.”

“Well enough,” J said. “For I have no interest in her.”

John had intended that J would miss the king and queen altogether, and timed the arrival of his son to the date when the court was due to have moved on. But there was the usual delay and confusion, and they were a week late in going. J, cutting the full-blown roses in the rose court and carefully shaking the petals into a broad flat basket for drying, looked up and saw that a short dark-haired woman was watching him.

He took in the wealth of jewels, the rich silk and lace of her gown and the straggle of courtiers behind her, and pulled off his hat and bowed, as low as he should go for courtesy, but no lower.

“Who are you?” she asked abruptly.

“I am John Tradescant, the younger John Tradescant, Your Highness,” J said.

“I want the white petals separated from the pink,” she told him.

“I am keeping them apart, Your Majesty,” J said.

“You may take them to the still room when they are dry,” she said.

J bowed. They were to be dried in the silk house and the woman who ran the still room did not need them. These were for the masquing, and the Master of Revels and the Wardrobe Mistress would receive them, but there was little point in arguing when a queen wished to pretend that she understood the running of her palace.

“I want a tree planted in the middle of this court,” she announced suddenly. “A large tree, and roses growing up to the roots. It is to symbolize my husband’s care of his people. An oak tree, to symbolize his power and strength, and white roses to symbolize the innocent good people, clustered all around him.”

“Roses don’t like shade, Your Majesty,” J ventured cautiously. “Unfortunately I don’t think they will thrive under an oak tree.”

“Surely you can plant some!”

“They need the sunshine, and they like the air through their branches,” J said. “They will wither and die if they are planted beneath an oak tree.”

She pouted at him, as if he were being deliberately obtuse. “But it is symbolic!”

“I see that,” J said. “But the roses won’t thrive.”

“Then you must plant and replant every time they die.”

J nodded. “I could do that, Your Majesty, if it is your wish. But it would be very wasteful.”

“I don’t care what it costs,” she said simply.

“And you would never have a large rosebush, because it would never have the time to be established, Your Majesty.”

She nodded, and paused in thought, tapping her little foot on the perfectly raked gravel. J thought that it must be rare that anyone refused to do her bidding. The courtiers, who had been lagging behind, had caught her up and were staring at him, and eyeing the queen as if they feared that his intransigence might cause them all to suffer the explosion of royal temper.