Once upon a time, there lived the princess of a small but wealthy kingdom. Now this princess was very beautiful, as princesses are usually supposed to be. The problem with this princess, however, was that she knew it. She was incredibly vain. She had two enormous looking glasses hung in her bedchamber; the better to admire her silken curls and porcelain complexion. Her opinion of herself was very high indeed. She vowed she would marry only the richest and handsomest of princes. Her standard was exacting, and she had rejected many suitors in the past. None had she deemed worth even a moment of her precious time, she had scorned them all.
Now in this very same kingdom, there lived a poor gardener’s boy. He was an apprentice at the castle grounds. He was desperately poor, and walked with a limp, but his hands were gentle, and any flower under his care blossomed. The garden birds sang sweeter with his cheerful whistling to accompany them. Even the fairies that secretly inhabited the castle gardens couldn’t help but love him, ragged and low though he was. His heart was nobler and purer than the most vaunted knights in the king’s service.
Now this young man was hopelessly in love with the coldly beautiful princess. Having only seen her from afar, he had no way of knowing about her thoughtless nature. To his thinking, someone that celestially beautiful must be lovely of heart as well. His highest aspiration was that she would come walking through the gardens, and that he might be able to present her with some of the flowers he had painstakingly labored to grow for her. So day in and day out he toiled, in sun and in rain, daring raise his thoughts only as high as the chance of giving the great princess a bouquet of his loveliest flowers.
One day, to his amazement and delight, the princess decided to take a stroll through her gardens. She and her ladies-in-waiting descended upon the garden in their rustling silk dresses like a flock of colorful exotic birds. The gardener’s boy picked a bouquet of his most beautiful flowers with trembling fingers. When the princess approached, he bowed low and held them out to her. “Please, Your Highness,” he said. “For you.” There was a pause, which was broken by the derisive snickering of the ladies-in-waiting.
“Never,“ proclaimed the haughty princess. “Could I accept flowers from a commoner. Especially one so lowly as you.” Cruelly, she snatched the bouquet from his hands and threw it, scattered, upon the ground. The gardener’s boy’s heart froze within him. He slowly sank to his knees there among the fallen petals, and knelt there, dumbly, until the entourage of ladies had swept by him.
No matter he tried to tell himself. But tears glimmered in his eyes and his hand shook as he picked up a formerly perfect rose, whose petals lay scattered upon the grass around him. From that day on, the gardener’s boy’s heart lay heavy in his chest. He did his work as well as before-he was that sort of lad-but he was unhappy and grieved. The fairies of the garden, who loved him, took notice. Deciding something must be done, they left the castle grounds to enter the deep forest beyond, and speak with their queen.
When they poured out their story before her, enthroned in her woodlands, they told her of the poor gardener’s boy and the proud disdain of the princess. They told her of his gentle care and his kind hands. The fairy queen smiled archly to herself as the story ended. “I shall have to pay a visit to this princess.” She said. All the assembled fairies clapped their hand and cheered in anticipation, making a sound like leaves tossing in a gale.
It so happened that the princess took the very next day to walk in the gardens alone. Turning the corner around a rose arbor she came abruptly upon an old woman in a ragged cloak. The woman beckoned to her but the haughty princess lifted her proud nose even higher into the air and turned away. The fairy queen (for it was she, disguised) smiled to herself, and suddenly the princess found she could not move. Her feet stayed in place, as if they were rooted to the very earth. And to her shock and horror, they were. Her hands and arms were lengthening into stalks and tendrils. She was being wholly transformed into a plant. In moments, all that remained of the princess was a simple little wildflower, as incongruous in that grand garden as a calico gown at a state ball. The disguised fairy smiled again and swept regally out of the gardens, her ragged disguise evaporated into nothing.
Meanwhile, the princess was so terrified her leaves were trembling. What on earth had happened to her? How was she to regain her own form? As she panicked, a shadow fell across her. It was the gardener’s boy. The princess’s despair was complete. She did not belong, surely he would pluck her out and cast her out to wilt and die on some rubbish heap.
But no-the lad knelt, touching one of the little plant’s leaves with the same care he showed to the grandest flowers in the garden. He smiled at the woebegone plant, a sweet crooked smile. “Poor little thing.” he said. “How on earth did you sprout here and not alongside some farmer’s field?” He should have weeded out the wildflower, but instead he gently dug it out by the roots, with sure hands. All day he kept the roots moist and when dusk fell, he took it with him to his tumbledown cottage in the village and planted it by his doorstep. He carefully weeded around the plant, and worked rich soil from the castle gardens around its base. He watered it everyday, and ringed it with white river stones. The princess was relieved not to be weeded out, but she mourned nonetheless, thinking that she would never be human again.
Days passed, and each evening she watched the gardener’s boy limp tiredly home, to eat a meager crust of bread and to fall asleep exhausted in his narrow cot. She saw his tenderness and kindness to everything from herself to the village children who passed by. He even shared the crumbs from his meals with the birds and small animals that visited his cottage. And the princess, with nothing to do but think, began to remember what had happened earlier in the palace gardens, and to feel ashamed. The gardener’s boy spoke to her sometimes, or to the birds he fed. He spoke of his love for the princess, and of the sorrow he felt both over her rejection, and the worry at her mysterious disappearance.
The princess began to notice things about him. He may have been lame, and his ears stuck out, but his eyes were lovely and gentle, green as a young wheat field. He may have hacked his hair raggedly off with his own garden shears, but it was the dark brown of newly turned earth. She saw how the smallest beggar child or oldest peddler women trusted him, and she saw them gather around him in the increasingly chilly evenings to hear the fantastic stories he spun of life in the castle.
All this she saw, and came to mourn even more acutely her rash and cruel behavior. She hardly recognized the pang in her heart whenever he was near, but soon she came to realize that she had fallen in love with the gardener’s boy. Only it was too late, she was transformed into a plant, and autumn was fast stripping the leaves from their trees. “At least I will spend the last of my days here, with him” thought the formerly proud princess. As the nights grew ever colder she could feel her stems and leaves grow stiff and brittle. One morning, the world suddenly glittered with the first frost, and she could feel the spark of life within her begin to fade out.
That morning, the gardener’s boy paused in front of his wildflower as he left his cottage. He touched one of the leaves, saddened at the killing frost. “You were lovely while you lasted, little one” he said. Compelled by something he couldn’t explain he bent and kissed an icy leaf.
The princess suddenly could perceive nothing any longer; the world was one great rush of wind. As her surroundings spun dizzily around her, she realized with amazement that she was human once more, crumpled at the garden’s boy’s feet. He fell to his knees in astonishment-“My lady!” he gasped-but she, beginning to cry, wrapped her arms around him and sobbed into his rough tunic.
“Please-“ She managed to say, “can you ever forgive me for the terrible way I treated you?”
The gardener’s boy smiled, and took her hands to help her stand. “Of course.” he told her. Gently, he helped her into the cottage where he wrapped his only threadbare blanket around her shoulders, and made hot water in a kettle over his fire. “I’m sorry.” he told her, blushing. “I don’t have any tea leaves.” But to his astonishment, the princess was smiling at him and gazing at him in a way that made him feel as if he might be a great prince after all. When she had finally grown warm enough to move, and had told him her story, he took her back to the castle-scare daring to believe the girl he had loved for so long was clinging to his work-roughened hand as if she’d never let go. It seemed a dream. It still seemed a dream when the king and queen were hanging a chain of gold around his neck in honor of his saving the princess from the spell cast upon her. And still when the princess declared to him and her parents that if he still loved her and would have her, she would marry no one but he, as she loved him dearly. The king and queen were indignant, considering a chain of honor reward enough for any commoner. They were swiftly mollified, however, by the materialization of the fairy queen and all her retinue in the royal throne room.
“This young man is under my protection.” announced the fairy queen. “And as someone favored by the fairy court, one should really consider if your daughter is worthy of him.” But then she smiled, and took the hands of the gardener’s boy and of the princess, joining them. “And I declare her so.” she said.
And so the gardener’s boy married the princess, and they were extraordinarily happy. They had three beautiful children, two girls and a boy. And upon the death of the princess’s parents, they became the wisest and kindest rulers the kingdom had ever seen.
And they all lived happily ever after.