Napoleon’s Garden at St. Helena

May 5, 1821

Dearest reader,

On this day, two centuries and more have passed since the mighty Emperor of France — Napoleon Bonaparte — drew his final breath on a lonely rock in the South Atlantic.

The year 2021 marked the 200th anniversary of his death, and how curious it is to think that the man who once commanded nations spent his last days tending lettuces and lilies, rather than legions.

One account of Napoleon's passing tells us that

"He died during a terrible thunderstorm that shook the house to its foundations and would have alarmed everyone but for the all-absorbing tragedy of Napolean's departure."

Can you imagine, dear reader, the heavens themselves raging as though to mourn him — or perhaps to warn us that even the greatest oak must one day fall?

In 1815, after the crushing debacle at Waterloo, Napoleon found himself exiled to the island of St. Helena — that small, wind-whipped garden in the middle of an endless sea. There, stripped of armies and ambition, he discovered a new kind of conquest: the conquering of his own restlessness through the peaceful art of gardening.

His physician, the Italian Dr. François Antommarchi (whose name, if you please, sounds like a mid-summer aria), prescribed digging in the earth as therapy. And dig the Emperor did.

“Naturally,” we are told, “Napoleon wanted everyone around him — except the ladies — to join him in the garden at Longwood.”

With characteristic zeal, he installed grottoes, planned alleys and paths, enriched the stubborn soil with manure, and even shot poor Count Bertrand’s goat for nibbling his cherished plants.

One must imagine him there, dressed improbably in a loose gown and straw hat, sweating beneath the Atlantic sun.

What image could be more extraordinary — or more human?

Historian Ruth Scurr, in her luminous biography Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows, reminds us that gardens framed Napoleon’s life from beginning to end. At St. Helena, his gardening was also a strategy: Dr. Antommarchi suggested sunken paths so Napoleon could wander beyond the prying eyes of British guards. Perhaps he found, within those shadowed walks, a secret freedom no empire could provide.

And when the Emperor was briefly permitted to return to Malmaison after Waterloo, he sought out the solace of Josephine’s gardens — those abundant, perfumed relics of better days. The painter Redouté had once immortalized Josephine’s roses there; her hothouse glowed with exotic flora she loved so well.

In Ruth’s account,

“The 26th of June [1815] was a very hot day. Napoleon spent it at Malmaison reminiscing about the past.

He walked up and down with his hands behind his back in what had once been his personal garden...

He also lingers among exotic trees that Josephine has always insisted on planting herself.”

Dearest reader, what do you make of this gardener-general?

Do you suppose the earth offered him a peace no crown could ensure?

Did the same hand that reshaped a continent find comfort in reshaping a garden bed?

One wonders if, in watering his vegetables, Napoleon was — for the first and last time — at peace.

Today, Longwood House still blooms with traces of his exile.

Time has softened the soil where armies once trampled, and perhaps that is the truest victory of all: the transformation of ambition into growth, and power into patience — learned, at last, among the tulips and thyme.