The Secret Garden
21.08.2023 - 11:53
/ theunconventionalgardener.com
/ Emma Doughty
One of the stories that I read as a child that has stayed with me is The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. For a long time I had a copy on my bookshelf, but when I had the urge to read it last week I discovered that was no longer the case. Fortunately it’s easy enough to find a free copy, particularly as it’s part of the new range of free Amazon Kindle Classics, which you can read via the free Amazon Kindle app – you don’t need an actual Kindle.
The Secret Garden is the story of a young English girl, raised in India and orphaned in a cholera outbreak. She’s sent back to England to live with her uncle in a stately pile on the Yorkshire moors. When she arrives she’s sallow, skinny and sullen. Her uncle is always absent, and a sad and lonely man who can’t get over the death of his beautiful wife.
Left to her own devices, Mary learns to amuse herself in the gardens. She befriends a grumpy old gardener, and a robin. She uncovers the secret garden, a rose garden locked shut since the death of her uncle’s wife. And she meets Dickon, the younger brother of a housemaid, who lives a feral life on the moors and is able to charm wild animals.
“The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place.”
In time, she discovers another secret – her invalid cousin Colin. Colin has spent his whole life shut away in the house, terrified that he will turn into a hunchback like his father, and fearful that he is too ill to survive. The truth is there’s nothing much wrong with Colin that a less cloistered life wouldn’t fix.
Dick
The website greengrove.cc is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can
send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.