Dare to dazzle!

Did you know that Marie-Antoinette, the glamorous French Queen known for her pink puff dresses and sugar-spun hairdos, had a 'dirty' hobby? To escape the rigid rules and prying eyes of the 18th-century royal court, the fashion icon created a lush, secret garden that became a feminine oasis in the stern, symmetrical garden landscape of Versailles.

Sadly, the queen was too much a'head' of her time - quite literally - to witness how her high-glamour-meets-luscious-nature aesthetics would spark the next big art movement, Rococo The name referred to the artificial grottoes decorated with shells and pebbles ('rocaille' in French) that were the highlights of the Rococo gardens. As you can see in the Fragonard painting 'Happy Accidents of the Swing', where a lady in a gorgeous pink dress offers her admirer an 'accidental' upskirt view, these gardens were flirty, feminine playgrounds for lovers and rebels.

A few decades later, in that same spirit, Regency era novelist and keen gardener Jane Austen used gardens as a place where her characters could fall in love and break the rules. In 'Pride and Prejudice', for example, Elizabeth falls in love with Mr. Darcy when she sees his beautiful garden. When he proposes to her - in a garden, of course! - she says yes, in one of literature's most romantic moments. Marie-Antoinette would have approved.