The Marly Garden owes its name to a king's joke at his own expense. In 1715, Frederick William I converted the palace garden next to his Potsdam residence into a parade ground, then established a new kitchen garden nearly two kilometres away. He called it "my Marly," a wry reference to Louis XIV's famous private retreat near Versailles, meaning: look how modest I am by comparison.

The name stuck.

His son, the future Frederick the Great, played here as a child while his father made salad. It may be where Frederick first imagined what would become Sanssouci.

More than a century later, Frederick William IV commissioned landscape architect Peter Lenné to transform the old vegetable beds into a formal park, built around the Peace Church. Lenné's design was so admired it became a model copied across Europe.

VoiceMap's Marly Garden Park tour traces the garden's arc from royal kitchen plot to Lenné's masterwork, connecting it to Frederick the Great's childhood and the competing egos of Prussian and French kingship.