A story of Love, Rivalry and Spectacular Gardens

<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12501905-queen-elizabeth-in-the-garden" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Queen Elizabeth in the Garden: A Story of Love, Rivalry, and Spectacular Gardens" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327939958m/12501905.jpg" /></a><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12501905-queen-elizabeth-in-the-garden">Queen Elizabeth in the Garden: A Story of Love, Rivalry, and Spectacular Gardens</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1985574.Trea_Martyn">Trea Martyn</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/364393373">4 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
Why four stars when I continually fell asleep reading this book. First, it's about gardens we can no longer see so there are no photographs. If anyone had asked me, I would have suggested line drawings of the plants and flowers, garden layouts and fountains, many no longer known even to long-time (United States) gardeners. Such poetic or since it's Elizabethan, raw names. Ok, still to support the four stars, so much therefore is left up to the imagination that it's a good read anyway. I would have liked at least to see Dudley's totem as a line drawing, that must be around the British Museum somewhere. Dudley, William Cecil, not to mention the royal suitors, vying for ER-one favors with grandiose precursors of Disneyland is entertaining history. THE Queen plays her cards so well, saving pots of money, progressing around England each summer 'visiting the great houses' with her entourage of hundreds. I am so glad she did and the records remain. And it was a brilliant on her part to keep all the bigwigs busy improving their real estate in anticipation of her visits. Rather than fighting or marrying her.<br /><br />I preservered with this book because I had just finished a novel about her youth <i>The Tudor Wench</i>, seen a Brit film with Stewart Granger as Dudley, Deborah Kerr as Catharine Parr and Jean Simmons as <em>Young Bess</em>.<br /><br />Then came the Epilogue, delightful, worth stumbling through the heavy handed prose of the chapters which read like research lists. The voice changes, the tone lightens, and I was left fully satisfied with reading the book.
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