It need not be a large garden which provides the daily record. How can it be possible to complain of a garden or a flower? And the gardener should be of a gay and valiant spirit. The daily story should be told faithfully and in simple phrases. It is only personal experience which provides actual facts and information. Under the black earth slow, unseen stirring. If while living in one’s own garden one could simply relate day by day the things which happen in it, the things which happen to it, the things which happen to the gardener! What a human document the record would end by becoming! What a revelation of one’s power to imagine and one’s determination to create! Also, if it were done faithfully, how practical and useful it would be! The tiny seeds, twenty-five cents a packet then the waiting while the soft, silent, black earth seems to be doing nothing. The autumn is a flare of golden trumpets singing in all-brilliant tones the triumph of the past year and heralding the future of the spring for which the winter will prepare.Īs long as one has a garden one has a future, and as long as one has a future one is alive. The summer, which is to be the future of the spring, finds one almost reeling before its first outburst of roses of all blushes and pallors and sunlight-yellows and crimsons-and carries on with the blues and violets and flushed turquoise of delphiniums and the splendors of every other shade and color in the world. In the spring, which is the future of the darkest winter days, the garden one’s imagination sees is carpeted in its first hours with crocuses and dazzling blue scillas, golden cushions and borders of alyssum saxatile, purple mats of aubrietia in its second hours daffodils and jonquils fill every corner and are only crowded out by white narcissuses and tulips of every shade of scarlet and white, and iris of every tint of yellow and violet and lavender and blue, with azalea bushes flaming coral or thrilling rose here and there behind or between.

To live in brilliantly colored and eloquent catalogues is to dream dreams unlike all others that glorify our days to pore over gardening books is to glow with joy, ambition and flaming desire for loveliness, color, fragrance and still, sweet delight. To the gardener in winter one’s future is the spring. There are a number of things and conditions which will provide futures if time and interest are given to them, but no one of them seems so natural, so simple and so alluring as making a garden. And it is the looking forward to a future which makes the difference between the two states of being. It is remaining alive which makes life worth living-not merely remaining on the surface of the earth. Wheresoever I go I can never leave the earth alone.Īs long as one has a garden one has a future and as long as one has a future one is alive. I have had many gardens in many countries, but I have not seen them since. If that were not quite another story it would be amusing to relate the history of how gardens can be made to spring up in places where they are horribly wanted-not large gardens and not through spending much money. I must make some bit of it into a garden while I am near it. Wheresoever I go I can never leave the earth alone. Just as the spirit of Lilias Craven had whispered “in the garden” to her husband to draw him back to their son, Burnett’s final work leaves us with a message to carry forward. Vivian drew the book’s title from the concluding chapter of The Secret Garden.

In a sense, this short book is both gardening memoir and her bequest to the rest of us. After her death, Vivian brought the manuscript of the one extended piece she had finished to a publisher. She had gotten an assignment from The Country Gentleman, a popular magazine, for a series of six gardening essays called “Gardening for Everybody.” She began as her health was failing. “I love them.” Then she predicted, “I’m going to write a garden book someday.” It took her twenty years to fulfill her pledge, and she did not live to see it in print. “Can’t we talk about gardens?” she asked. In 1904, Burnett interrupted an interviewer.

Frances hodgson burnett secret garden