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The late autumn of 1688 was a remarkably tense time to be an English monarch. King James II, a man with a rare talent for alienating almost everyone he met, was rapidly discovering that absolute power is remarkably difficult to maintain when nobody actually likes you. His subjects were anxious, his parliament was furious, and the political landscape of the British Isles was as dry and unstable as tinder. The English aristocracy, still haunted by the bloody chaos of the Civil War and the devastating ashes of the Great Fire of London, desperately wanted stability. What they did not want was a king who seemed determined to drag the country back into religious strife and autocratic rule. Naturally, they did what any sensible, self-preserving ruling class would do: they sent a polite, slightly desperate letter to a foreign prince, inviting him to launch a military invasion of their own country. The recipient of this extraordinary invitation was William of Orange, the Stadtholder of the Netherlands. William was a quiet, serious, and deeply pragmatic Dutch Protestant who happened to be married to James II's eldest daughter, Mary. To the English conspirators, William was the perfect solution to their royal problem. He was safely Protestant, reasonably royal, and, most importantly, possessed a very large, highly disciplined navy. When William landed at Torbay on November 5, 1688, with a fleet of over four hundred ships, the English public watched with a mixture of curiosity and profound relief. What followed has been gloriously branded by history as the Glorious Revolution, a supposedly bloodless transition of power that established the supremacy of Parliament over the Crown. James II, realizing the game was up, threw the Great Seal of the Realm into the River Thames and fled to France in the dead of night. With the old king gone, the British state was rebuilt. William and Mary were crowned as co-monarchs, signing the Bill of Rights and forever changing the nature of British governance. The era of the absolute monarch was dead, replaced by the early framework of a modern constitutional monarchy. Yet, while the politicians in Westminster were busy celebrating their newly won liberties and drafting complex legal codes, the new king was quietly looking out of the window of Whitehall Palace, feeling thoroughly miserable. William of Orange had not crossed the stormy North Sea because he harbored a deep, burning passion for English constitutional reform. He had come because he needed England's wealth and military might to defend his beloved Dutch homeland against the aggressive expansion of King Louis XIV of France. Furthermore, William absolutely detested London. He hated the drafty, sprawling mess of Whitehall Palace, he despised the endless, sycophantic court rituals, and, above all, he could not stand the air. London in the late seventeenth century was a choked, smoky metropolis, fueled by the burning of sea-coal and surrounded by damp, marshy ground. For a man who suffered from chronic, agonizing asthma, the city was a slow-motion execution chamber. William needed an escape. He needed fresh air, quiet spaces, and, most importantly, he needed to dig. For beneath the armor of the fierce military commander who had successfully orchestrated one of the most audacious political takeovers in European history lay the heart of an obsessive, passionate, and thoroughly meticulous gardener. William of Orange was a king who preferred tulips to court politics, and his arrival would permanently alter not just the laws of Great Britain, but the very landscape of the island itself. To understand William's botanical obsession, one must understand the unique culture of the Dutch Republic from which he emerged.