Once, long ago, there lived a knight who owned many beautiful houses and estates which he, like other knights, visited from time to time.

And, like other knights, he had one burning, all-consuming passion in his life, the desire to create and possess the most beautiful garden in the whole world.

So the knight decided to ordain a sans-pareil of flowers and shrubs, rockeries and sunken gardens, complete with rivers, lakes and grottoes at the farthest-flung of all his estates, vying with his friends to make his the most wonderful of all.

The most talented of his gardeners listened carefully, excited and honoured that he had been chosen to undertake this great project as the knight explained what he wanted and how this was to be a garden that would be remembered for all time.

"In ten years," said the knight, "I shall return to see what you have done."

So, for ten years the gardener worked, urging on his assistants to create the most beautiful garden in the world. For ten years they slaved through the cold of the winter and the heat of the summer, laying lawns, creating grottoes and filling lakes. They constructed bridges, built rockeries, planted trees and shrubs and sent all over the country, and distant lands beyond, for the rarest, most exotic and most beautiful plants and flowers that could be found.

Slowly, as year followed year, the garden grew more beautiful, more mature and more certainly the most enchanting garden in the world.

Until finally the day approached when the knight was due to return and he with his retinue could just be seen far away on the horizon. Feverishly the men made their final preparations until the gardener, weary from all his work, surveyed the scene with quiet satisfaction and secret delight until, that is until, quite suddenly, a storm broke. A storm of unbelievable proportions.

A storm which tore through the gardens, lashing the trees, uprooting the shrubs, crushing the flowers and flooding the rivers which broke their banks, sweeping away the bridges and leaving a trail of devastation and destruction in its wake.

All night it raged as the knight approached and when at last he arrived to see what had been done in his absence, he surveyed the scene before him.

And then he set off to find his gardener who was sitting under a rock, with tears in his eyes and despair etched into his face as surely as the wind and the rain had etched away at the beauty of his garden.

"Well," said the knight, looking down at the man, "why are you so sad?"

The gardener, unable to speak, simply surveyed the ruins of his work and said nothing. And the knight, reading it all in the man's eyes, sat down beside his servant and for a long time said nothing as they shared the sight before them.

Then suddenly the knight stood up and said: "Come! I can see no reason for your despair."

And the gardener looked at him in disbelief.

"Beauty," said the knight, "is more than what we see, not something that even the most savage storm can destroy. So, considering the power of the storm and what still remains, I know I'm looking at a garden which was, and is, what I asked you to make: the most beautiful garden in the world."

But this is an old story, the English Knight explained, and it has many versions. One says that the gardener is a girl and the knight never leaves her. Another says that the knight is a princess who goes away, never to return. And in a third the gardener is a knight and the knight a princess and together they first rebuild their garden and then create another within it a garden more beautiful than the first and so secret that no-one else was ever allowed to enter it. But only those concerned could ever be sure about what really happened. And even they must have wondered at times.