Al-Yanna is Catalina’s imagined garden of eternal life: at once a Moorish conception of paradise, a remembered landscape of the Alhambra, and the place where she expects to be reunited with Arthur, Prince of Wales. It gives shape to her mourning and sustains her through the years in which she must remain in England, carry out her royal obligations, and live without the husband she still loves.

Meaning and Landscape

Al-Yanna is not presented simply as a garden Catalina can visit. She understands its name through its several meanings: heaven, a cemetery, and a garden. In the conception she recalls, heaven itself is an eternal garden. The word therefore holds together earthly landscape, burial, and the afterlife. It offers no clean separation between the place she has lost and the place where she hopes to find Arthur again.

That layered meaning is anchored in the scenery of the Alhambra. In a dream, Catalina walks there with Arthur, showing him the sandstone wall around the fort, Granada below, and the snow-capped Sierra Nevada on the horizon. The garden is beautiful, but it is also recognizably part of the country she has left. Al-Yanna makes remembered Spain more than a distant homeland: it becomes a spiritual landscape through which Catalina can imagine continuity with Arthur.

Her seasonal recollection of the Alhambra gives that attachment a material texture. She imagines frost leaving the canals as snowmelt rushes down from the Sierra Nevada, gardens warming, flowers and saplings being planted, and the heavy window hangings coming down to admit warm breezes. Olive trees, returning summer birds, and farmers turning red earth belong to the same picture of renewal. Against the lingering cold and gray skies of England, this remembered landscape makes al-Yanna feel both like a paradise beyond ordinary life and like a home with familiar seasons and work.

A Place of Reunion

In Catalina’s dream on the eve of her betrothal to Prince Harry, the garden becomes a meeting place with the dead. She tells Arthur that she has fulfilled what he and she had planned: she is to remain a princess and become queen, completing what she understands as her mother’s wishes, her own destiny, and God’s will. Arthur answers by promising to watch over her in al-Yanna. As his hand grows lighter and his face dissolves like mist, Catalina promises that she will come to him one day. The dream gives their separation an imagined future without suggesting that it is already over.

That promise recurs in her private language of grief. When she considers all she still cares for, she names her love for Arthur and her longing for Spain, the Alhambra, and al-Yanna together. The garden is therefore not a consolation detached from her earthly attachments. It gathers them: love for Arthur, longing for home, and hope for a reunion after death. Its force comes precisely from the fact that she must continue living far from both the husband and homeland she associates with it.

The Garden and the Work of Mourning

Al-Yanna also gives Catalina a way to speak to Arthur while remaining among the living. After the loss of a pregnancy, she withdraws from the anxious faces around her and asks Arthur to wait beside quiet waters where white and red rose petals fall. She imagines returning only after she has given birth to the children she hopes for and completed her duty. In this appeal, reunion is deferred rather than used to excuse withdrawal: the garden waits, while her obligations in England remain unfinished.

The repeated images of waiting make the place an emotional counterweight to the passage of time. Catalina measures years of delay, missed chances for pregnancy, and repeated prayer against her continuing bond with Arthur. The garden promises neither an immediate escape nor an earthly remedy for those losses. Instead, it gives her a language in which love can endure separation, and in which an imagined future with Arthur can coexist with the pain of the present.

A Promise Joined to Queenship

Catalina’s attachment to al-Yanna does not displace her determination to be queen. She imagines Arthur waiting there while she insists that she will remain at her post and be constant to him. Her promise to him becomes part of the account she gives herself of why she must continue: she will be Queen of England as she believes she was born to be, and the rose, she hopes, will bloom in England as well as in heaven. The garden thus joins fidelity to a dead husband with a political future in a country that was not her original home.

At her coronation, Katherine of Aragon recognizes that Arthur is truly gone and that she is fulfilling their promise by marrying Henry VIII, even though he is not Arthur. She still hopes Arthur is watching over her from al-Yanna. Later, she interprets her royal task as divinely appointed: to guide the king toward sound choices, secure the succession, and protect England’s borders. In that vision, earthly service does not cancel the promised reunion; it is the work she must complete before she can return to the garden.

Al-Yanna consequently occupies two times at once. It is the remembered and dreamed landscape of Catalina’s Spanish past, and the hoped-for destination of a future beyond death. Between them lies the active life of Katherine, bound to the English crown and to duties she believes are hers to fulfill. The garden’s recurring promise is not that she can recover her former life unchanged, but that love and memory can persist while she carries that life forward.