Troja Chateau Garden Vineyard Countdown Timer

The Troja Chateau sits out in the suburbs of Prague with a formal garden and a hedge maze and a working vineyard, and on a clear afternoon it feels less like a palace and more like somebody's very ambitious weekend project. The building is that pale cream colour with the deep red roof, symmetrical and sure of itself, and the gardens spread out in front of it in a pattern that only makes sense from above. The vineyard is the foreground, rows and rows of vines on a slope, and there are little wooden tables set out among them where people were, I assume, drinking the wine that came from the vines, which is either very efficient or very smug. I got up on the terrace to shoot this because from ground level the geometry disappears, and geometry is the whole point of a garden like this. The light was coming through a thin layer of cloud, soft and even. A gardener was working one of the rows, bent over, entirely uninterested in the view he was standing in the middle of. Good for him. I would have taken the afternoon off to sit at one of those little tables, given the chance.