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precise parterre, they could afford a few tulip bulbs. The flower, which had once been the exclusive plaything of millionaires and kings, gradually became accessible to the wider public. Cottage gardens across England began to fill with the vibrant, cheerful colors of the tulip. The English quickly discovered that the flower was remarkably hardy, capable of thriving in the damp, unpredictable British climate. They planted them in neat rows along their garden paths, next to their vegetables and herbs, creating a unique, distinctly British blend of the formal and the practical. Furthermore, the cultivation of tulips and other exotic flowers sparked a wave of early scientific curiosity among the general public. Florists' feasts, which were competitive exhibitions where local growers gathered in taverns to display their finest blooms, became incredibly popular. These events were not just social gatherings; they were early forums for scientific debate, where amateur gardeners shared observations on soil chemistry, plant breeding, and pest control. The common people were taking the elite, highly structured science of the royal gardens and turning it into a democratic, community-focused hobby. They were finding beauty, order, and a sense of personal agency in the simple act of nurturing a bulb through the dark winter months and watching it burst into spectacular life in the spring. The reign of William and Mary was destined to be relatively short. Queen Mary died of smallpox in 1694, leaving William to rule alone. The king, his health steadily declining, spent his remaining years divided between his military campaigns and his beloved gardens. In the spring of 1702, William's extraordinary life came to an end in a manner that felt almost poetically tied to his outdoor passions. While riding his favorite horse, Sorrel, through the grounds of Hampton Court, the horse stumbled on a molehill. William was thrown from his mount, breaking his collarbone. The injury, combined with his already fragile, asthmatic constitution, proved too much for his body to bear. He contracted pneumonia and died a few weeks later at Kensington Palace, surrounded by the beautiful, orderly gardens he had spent his life creating. With William's death, the direct Dutch influence on the British throne came to an end. He was succeeded by Queen Anne, Mary's younger sister, who possessed very different tastes. Almost immediately, the grand, formal Dutch gardens began to fall out of fashion. The English, always restless and eager for the next trend, began to find the rigid symmetry, the clipped boxwood hedges, and the mathematically precise canals of the William and Mary style to be stifling and unnatural. By the mid-eighteenth century, a new generation of landscape designers, most notably Lancelot Capability Brown, would sweep across England. They would systematically demolish the formal parterres, fill in the geometric canals, and tear down the clipped hedges. In their place, they created the classic English landscape garden, characterized by rolling lawns, serpentine lakes, and artfully placed clumps of trees designed to look entirely natural, even though they were just as highly engineered as the Dutch gardens they replaced. Yet, it would be a mistake to think that William's horticultural legacy was wiped away. The King Who Preferred Tulips had left an indelible mark on the British soul. He had transformed gardening from a casual, aristocratic pastime into a highly organized, scientifically minded national industry. He had established the infrastructure of the great British nurseries, introduced advanced greenhouse technology, and fostered a deep, enduring love for botanical exploration and classification. Most importantly, he had firmly planted the tulip in the heart of the British landscape. The flower, once a foreign, exotic curiosity, had become