Photo by @simonnorfolkstudio I Blenheim Palace near Oxford—one of the greatest of England's stately homes— was a gift from a grateful nation to a general, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, for his victories in battle. A contemporary guidebook to the palace and its gardens— William Fordice Mavor's "New Description of Blenheim"—contained the extraordinary suggestion that the original layout for planting the "military oaks" in the gardens imitated the disposition of the troops at the beginning of the Battle of Blenheim on August 13, 1704. Just think—a battlefield laid out in the heart of England in a massive, leafy reminder of a faraway military conquest! There is little evidence to supp