That title, “The King of Canada” startled me. I’d never heard it expressed in quite that way.
With my friend Heather, I saw Queen Elizabeth when she came to Banff in 1957; I handed her my wilted fist full of mountain wildflowers as her car passed by the intersection of Saint Julien Road and Tunnel Mountain Drive, near our house, on the mountain I grew up on. She graciously accepted them, sweat, ants and all. When I was young I thought she was dowdy and wore the ugliest hats, but as I grew older I came to admire her, and I now see how gorgeous she was as a young woman.
In my twenties I admired her son, Prince Charles, for his outspoken views on the environment and social reform, (for which he was ridiculed at the time). Sometimes I thought, perhaps she should step aside and give him a chance. I knew very little about him, or his mother for that matter, or rules and customs of succession, until that day in 2010, our last day visiting the Netherlands.
In February 2010, in icy Haarlem, with no cafe's in sight, we go to Teyler's Museum, the oldest museum in Holland, mainly because it is too rainy to be long outside. It's an odd, dusty, rambling collection of amazing fossils, minerals, paintings and scientific instruments around the broad theme of science and art. Grey is the predominant colour. On the second floor I walk past a door with no signage outside it to indicate a current exhibit, but I hear music; golden light radiates from under the closed door. I open the door. It's like walking from the dusty halls of history into the Garden of Eden. The room seems green and yellow, even the light, and the exhibit is Royal Gardening, botanical art from the eighteenth century to the present which includes tapestries sewn by Mary Queen of Scots and the florilegium of Marie Antoinette. The main focus is watercolours from the 2009 Highgrove Florilegium, botanical illustrations of flowers from Prince Charles' ecological garden at Highgrove, his personal residence in England. The books are in cases but also on video screens so you see the pages of the books. There is a film about Highgrove, a totally self-sustaining ecological garden. The watercolours are exquisite, painted mainly by women botanical artists selected in an exhaustive world wide search. I had never heard of The Prince's Charities, a cluster of charities, most started by Prince Charles personally, which focus on specific areas of sustainable living and development. They are funded in part from projects undertaken at Highgrove.
King Charles III took office at the perfect time, it seems to me. The world is finally ready for a symbol of where we might to be going with the world, rather than where we are. His work in the organic gardening movement, his brilliant combination of idealism and capitalism, and his care for history, culture, and heritage inspire me.
In 2017 Prince Charles commissioned a florilegium of wildflowers in Transylvania, where he had walked twenty years before. Perhaps we need a florilegium for the Canadian Rockies, although we already have, Wild Flowers of North America: Botanical Illustrations by Mary Vaux Walcott, “the Audubon of botany”, with 250 watercolors of wildflower life in the United States of America and Canada.
Tomorrow, May 27, 2025, King Charles III, our king, will deliver the Speech from the Throne in the Canadian Parliament.
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Thank you Carole for this beautiful thoughtful piece!!!🩷💞
perfect reading material for this day of royalty