Unearthing The Secret Garden

I've long been a fan of Marta McDowell's elegant and knowledgeable garden-related prose. For me, as a gardener a writer, and a reader, my cup overflows when she turns her discerning eye to writers and their gardens. Beatrix Potter, Emily Dickenson, Laura Ingalls Wilder have all received their due from this fine writer.  But, oh! when she takes on Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, it is a match made in gardening heaven.

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in saying that The Secret Garden is one of the formative and best beloved books of my childhood. And McDowell's account of Burnett's life and writing and gardens is a sumptuous feast of delights. Much like Louisa May Alcott, Burnett supported herself and her family by writing 'pot-boilers.' With the publication of Little Lord Fauntleroy, she became a wealthy woman--and was enabled to support her gardening passion in a manner most of us can only dream of.  Gardeners! Cartloads of rose bushes! Delphiniums by the bushel!

During the course of her life, Burnett made gardens at three homes--one in England, one on Long Island, and one in Bermuda. McDowell details the making of these wonderlands in such vivid description that the photographs and illustrations of which the book is full, are hardly necessary, delightful though they are.

And learning about Burnett herself was fascinating. I've had an almost lifelong acquaintance with Mary Lennox (The Secret Garden) and Sara Crewe (A Little Princess) and I loved seeing how they echoed bits of their creator's life.

Highly recommended, especially for gardeners and fans of The Secret Garden.

 

The Secret Garden?

"It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine. The high walls which shut it in were covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses which were so thick that they were matted together. Mary Lennox knew they were roses because she had seen a great many roses in India. All the ground was covered with grass of a wintry brown and out of it grew clumps of bushes which were surely rosebushes if they were alive. There were numbers of standard roses which had so spread their branches that they were like little trees. 

There were other trees in the garden, and one of the things which made the place look strangest and loveliest was that climbing roses had run all over them and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying curtains, and here and there they had caught at each other or at a far-reaching branch and had crept from one tree to another and made lovely bridges of themselves. 

There were neither leaves nor roses on them now and Mary did not know whether they were dead or alive, but their thin gray or brown branches and sprays looked like a sort of hazy mantle spreading over everything, walls, and trees, and even brown grass, where they had fallen from their fastenings and run along the ground. It was this hazy tangle from tree to tree which made it all look so mysterious. Mary had thought it must be different from other gardens which had not been left all by themselves so long; and indeed it was different from any other place she had ever seen in her life."

I've always loved The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and though there are no walls and only one rose, when I tackled this area yesterday, it was the long forgotten and much overgrown secret garden of the book that came to mind.

There's the blue bench Elizabeth and Phillip sit on in one novel -- it was being covered up by apple and forsythia branches. Elsewhere wild grapevines were hiding the rhododenrons and the smoke tree. What was a lovely garden room a few years ago is, to use a technical term, a BIG MESS.

Alas! I've let Elizabeth's garden go while trying to tell her story. In the best of all possible worlds, those stories would have brought in enough income to hire some help -- Julio?  Homero? Donde estan?

Not here, more's the pity. So yesterday I took pruning shears and loppers and began to rediscover my garden.   A hint of blue was winking at me from beyond a green fountain of forsythia and I hacked my way through to find a forgotten lace cap hydrangea -- a nice reward for a sweaty few hours.

Today I'll attack the wilderness once more -- load the clippings  up and take them to our brush pile and resume my battle with the wild grape.

As I recall, there's a Kousa dogwood back in there. 

Onward!