This was a modest garden at first, but his business partner offered to make it into something more substantial while he was away.

The lord went on his travels, came back, and found it more beautiful than he could possibly have imagined beforehand. We’re talking rolling hills, ancient oak groves, crystal ponds, imported flowers from every continent, peacocks just sort of wandering around like they paid taxes there.

Naturally, the lord became obsessed with turning it into the greatest public garden the kingdom had ever seen. And to his credit, he succeeded. People came from miles away just to stroll through it. Painters painted it. Poets wrote sonnets about it. Young couples proposed under the willow arches. Children fed ducks in the ponds. Old men sat on benches pretending to read newspapers while secretly judging everyone.

The lord spared no expense. He hired botanists from Holland, landscapers from France, arborists from Germany, one extremely intense Scottish groundskeeper; the best of the best. The centrepiece of the entire estate, however, was a majestic avenue of towering poplar trees, planted in perfect symmetry across the hillsides. They became world famous. Visitors called them “the green pillars of heaven.”

Then, disaster struck. One autumn evening, the sky darkened. The winds howled. Rain lashed the countryside. Lightning split the heavens apart. It was the single worst storm in living memory, and by morning, the estate was devastated. The ponds overflowed. The flower beds drowned. Stone paths collapsed into the mud. And the mighty poplars had been ripped out of the earth, lifeless on the shattered ground.

The lord was heartbroken. He wandered the wreckage in silence for weeks. The visitors stopped coming. The once-famous paradise became little more than a local memory. The years passed, and in that long and miserable time, nature slowly reclaimed the damage. Common grass returned first. Then weeds. A fox denned beneath a fallen archway. Insects settled in the desecrated hedges. Mice burrowed through the roots of the toppled trees. The lord eventually grew old and peacefully passed away, and though his family inherited his riches, the garden was nothing more than an afterthought. Nobody sincerely believed that the once lush and green landscape would ever recover.

Years later, however, on one unassuming spring morning, an old villager, who once frolicked in the beautiful garden as a boy, paused beside one of the enormous craters left by the uprooted poplars. There, growing in the mud, was a single beautiful flower. A butterfly landed on it. Nearby, new saplings had begun to emerge. The old man smiled warmly and said: “Well… that’s a bit of recovery.” And the vicar beside him nodded solemnly.

“Yes. Contrary to poplar relief.”