Enduring Lessons from The Secret Garden

messy gardens, fighting the wind, and love of nature

In one of my clearest childhood memories, I am sitting behind a shrub, pretending that I was in a secret garden. In suburban Indiana, there was not much by way of an actual walled garden like in the English countryside of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic novel, but tucked between vinyl siding and some low, poky branches, I made a little hiding spot for myself and daydreamed. When I was a girl, my grandmother gave me an illustrated copy of The Secret Garden for Christmas, and I was enchanted by the story from the first time I read it.

About a month ago, I was chatting with my friend Megan about the books and movies that my daughter is interested in. She asked if we had read Burnett’s A Little Princess or The Secret Garden yet. In another time, girlhood narratives were my research focus for my M.A. and Ph.D., and in 2011, Megan and I wrote a paper together about girlhood and colonialism in A Little Princess, which we presented at the 18th- and 19th- Century British Women Writers Conference in Columbus that year. Gushing over how much we love Alfonso Cuarón’s film adaptation of the novel was an early bonding experience in our 15-year friendship.

Unsure why we hadn’t read it yet, I decided to make The Secret Garden our next chapter book to read together at bedtime. I have been censoring the racist and colonialist bits, which I will admit I did not remember carrying on once the main character moves from India to England. I have also been surprised by how often Burnett uses the word “queer”—it feels like it’s once a page—and have been changing it to vary the vocabulary. Otherwise, the book’s themes about nature and childhood still resonate today.

Nature’s Healing Power in The Secret Garden

In The Secret Garden, Mary Lennox is orphaned during a cholera outbreak that she survives mostly because she is so unpleasant and unloved that her parents and the servants basically forget about her when people start falling ill. She is sent to live with her Uncle Craven at an estate on the Yorkshire moors in England. Her uncle is also unpleasant and sickly, and so he pretty much abandons her too. The only person who really cares for her at first is the chambermaid, Martha, who sends her out to play, trusting that the cold and the wind will put some color in her cheeks and help her appetite: “She made herself stronger by fighting with the wind.” I looked at the first illustration below so many times. It’s haunting:

Illustrations by Graham Rust for The Secret Garden

When I was a girl, this idea that being outdoors could turn a plain, bratty child into a beautiful, loving one read like a fairytale. Now that I have parented a small child myself, I have experienced how time in the garden really can turn a day around. My child’s teachers have also observed that she feels especially connected to nature, and there have been many afternoons when getting her to pull weeds or tend to flowers with her little watering can has caused an attitude adjustment in us both that feels miraculous. This philosophy that nature is healthy for us, and maybe especially for children, also comes through in current campaings to encourage outdoor playtime and to protect parks and public lands.

The healing impact that time in the garden has on Mary (and later her cousin, Colin) is portrayed in the book as magical to the reader, but it is important to remember that the titular secret garden is just an ordinary, abandoned garden. By finding it and bringing it back to life, Mary also reinvigorates herself and life at Misselthwaite Manor. It’s the simple act of gardening, of caring for the earth, that does the magic by connecting the children with the natural world.

As Colin observes:

“Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places.”

The children in the book are inclined to believe that the garden is magical, but adults redirect them to view the garden’s magic as part of something bigger, more universal. Martha’s mother, Susan Sowerby, explains, “Never thee stop believin' in th' Big Good Thing an' knowin' th' world's full of it - and call it what tha' likes. Tha' wert singin' to it when I come into t' garden.”

The Virtue of a Messy Garden

With some help from a robin, Mary finds the secret garden, a walled garden that has been locked (allegedly) for 10 years, since its original gardener, her father’s sister, passed away. Immediately, she follows her instinct to weed so that the bulbs have room to breathe. Then, she gets Martha’s brother, Dickon, to help her—secretly. Dickon is portrayed as a lovely and somewhat wild boy who spends all his time on the moors, befriending wild animals, and therefore has acquired knowledge of plants and critters.

When she tells him about the garden, he promises he would no more tell her secret than he would reveal where a missel thrush’s nest is.

Once he agrees to help her and keep the secret, Mary has another concern:

“I wouldn’t want to make it look like a gardener’s garden, all clipped an’ spick an’ span’ would you?” [Dickon] said. “It’s nicer like this with things runnin’ wild, an’ swinging’ an’ catchin’ hold of each other.”

“Don’t let us make it tidy,” said Mary anxiously. “It wouldn’t seem like a secret garden if it was tidy.”

As the keeper of an untidy garden, I was thrilled by this passage.

The wildness of the secret garden further drives home the themes about connection to nature. The Secret Garden is set in the late Victorian period, right around the turn of the century. During the Victorian Era, the trend on estates like Misselthwaite Manor was for the garden to mirror the architecture of the house, a reaction against the more wild, natural landscapes of the preceding Romantic Era. So, we’re talking straight lines, neat hedgerows, sculptured topiaries. The ire of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland caricatures these trends. By Burnett’s time, cottage gardens with less formal designs and more functional plants had become the preference among the middle class, in part as a reaction to the manicured gardens.

Mary’s secret garden has been left to itself, and has therefore become a safe place for wildlife to nest and for children to bloom. Although the children tend to the garden, planting flowers and reviving what’s there, in maintaining its wildness they draw on earlier romantic themes as well as naturalist ideas about childhood from Burnett’s time (and ours).

The Secret Garden and Montessori

Maria Montessori (1870-1952) and Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) were roughly contemporary, but as far as I found, never met each other. While rereading The Secret Garden in a time of our lives that has been steeped in the Montessori method, I have been struck by how many overlaps there are between Montessori and Burnett’s visions of children, nature, and autonomy.

Dr. Montessori believed that children have an innate love of nature and that love should be nurtured. That nature is one of the best teachers. Montessori pedagogy emphasizes the natural world, often connecting caring for nature to fostering peace.

Montessori also believed in developing autonomy and independence in children through allowing them to have self-direction. Once she arrives in England, no one really has time for Mary there either. In India, she was spoiled but neglected and unloved. In England, she is left to her own devices, but she is not uncared for. Martha takes an interest in her, and when Mary grows curious about gardening, Martha supports her. Martha’s mother also pitches in. Although their family is poor, Mrs. Sowerby uses some of Martha’s earnings to buy Mary a jump rope. Then, Martha encourages Mary to ask for some space to garden and to get her brother, Dickon, to teach her about seeds and acquire garden tools for her using Mary’s allowance.

Mrs. Sowerby is also bold enough to speak up and tell Mr. Craven not to get Mary a governess yet, suggesting that she be allowed to play outdoors and gain more strength before the discipline of formal education sets in.

Crucially, cooperation and collaboration were also important to Montessori’s pedagogy, and we see that borne out in how Mary, Dickon, and Colin work together on the garden. Working together to care for nature helps turn two very contrary and spoiled children into wonderful, healthy ones. I want to do a book club of this novel with Maria Montessori in the afterlife.

Enduring Lessons from Frances Hodgson Burnett

There are so many interesting elements of The Secret Garden, from how it positions the working class as much more sensible than Mary’s wealthy family, to how Burnett applies Victorian notions of childhood usually reserved for the upperclass to poor children and orphans, to the book’s whimsical depiction of birds and gardeners. I think what has made the book endure for so long, however, is how the story beautifully captures timeless lessons about belonging, nature, and love. For example:

• Who cares if you’re pretty if you neglect your child?

• If you want to be loved, you should be lovable, not a disagreeable little brat or a miserable recluse.

• Life finds a way—in secret gardens, locked corridors, and broken hearts.

• Loneliness is not always bad, but despair is toxic.

• “The two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way - or always to have it.”

• “There's naught as nice as th' smell o' good clean earth, except th' smell o' fresh growin' things when th' rain falls on 'em.”

Alongside The Secret Garden, I have also been reading Unearthing the Secret Garden: The Plants and Places That Inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett by Marta McDowell and have learned a lot about Burnett’s career and independent life, her own discovery of gardening, her scandalous second marriage, and how she curated a “room of her own.” I think this line from Burnett is a good one to close on:

“In a book given to a young neighbor, she wrote, ‘Nature never yet made a human hand without putting into it something to give.’ It was a sentiment she lived by.”

Well said.