It is 1674 and Louis XIV the mighty Sun King is ruling France and beset by battles.  At court all is pomp, show and artifice.  Jean-Baptiste de la Quintinie rules over a kingdom of his own and fights different enemies – the kingdom is the royal gardens and the enemies are frost, blights and insects, his subjects the many under gardeners who work for him.  He is a free spirit who has little time for court life and he sees his friends getting into trouble with La Reynie’s police (for this is the time of La Voisin and La Brinvilliers) while he just likes the quiet life.  In gardening he is unsurpassed but gets tired of the way his food is so little appreciated by people who only see the end product and not the process.  Versailles may be a haven against the wars that rage outside it but perhaps La Quintinie is the freest man of all – even more so than the King himself.

Richaud packs a lot into this little book and gives the essence of what being a gardener is like, but without a lot of details as to what he does.  I confess that I would have liked to read a little more about the running of the gardens at Versailles and the sort of activities that constituted a typical day and I am not usually interested in gardening myself!  The vanities of court life are contrasted well with the earthiness of gardening and La Quintinie with his sensible ideas and lack of time for fopperies and fashions is sure to appeal to modern readers.  The court is skilfully sketched in but then it is easy for most readers who are at least vaguely familiar with what it would have been like but the garden world proves elusive.  Entertaining, laconic but low on historical facts…high on thoughtful comparisons though which is surely the book’s true aim and here it does tend to stay in the mind afterwards.