Unearthing the Secret Garden

July 5, 2021
With this consideration of the English novelist Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924), garden historian McDowell (Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life) continues tripping down the verdant paths of writer-gardeners to study the ways plants informed their creations. Burnett, who wrote more than 50 novels, had four gardens: “a lost one in Kent, a fictional one in Yorkshire, and her last two gardens on Long Island and Bermuda.” McDowell explains how Burnett based the garden in The Secret Garden on the first one she had created at Maytham Hall in England. In this garden “of her own invention,” she planted roses and trained them up the walls, and hired a gardener, very like Weatherstaff in her novel. When Maytham’s owner sold the hall, Burnett returned bereft to New York, where she had spent part of her girlhood. “If she had stayed, The Secret Garden might never have been written,” McDowell asserts, because it was created in its memory. In addition to lists of Burnett’s plants, including her beloved delphiniums, McDowell includes Burnett’s posthumously published essay “In the Garden,” and photographs and illustrations add depth and context. Gardeners and book lovers alike will delight in this colorful survey.

October 1, 2021
Undoubtedly, generations of amateur gardeners and professional horticulturists credit the budding of their passion for plants to Burnett's cherished children's classic, The Secret Garden. In that coming-of-age tale, Burnett transforms surly young Mary Lennox from an abandoned and unloved outcast into an inquisitive and caring companion through her escapades in nature. McDowell does much the same for her subject, chronicling Burnett's life, from an impoverished childhood in Tennessee to international renown and riches through her prolific career as an essayist and novelist. Through the design, management, and enjoyment of gardens in England, America, and Bermuda, Burnett found solace from grief over deaths and divorces and created spaces for both private contemplation and public entertainment. McDowell, an award-winning landscape historian and lecturer, has previously deconstructed works by Emily Dickinson, Beatrix Potter, and Laura Ingalls Wilder to examine the relationship between such iconic authors and the gardens that inspired them. With a sprightly tone, infectious enthusiasm, and a professor's penchant for scholarly detail, McDowell brings keen insight and critical assessment to the life and works of this beloved author.

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