The Secret Garden

This book touched many from my generation.

For me, Mary’s abandonment by the adults around her, came close to home. I rooted for her to free her soul. It was the beauty of the garden and the gentle robin that first melted the ice around her heart by connecting her with nature.

Then along came Dickon, who had grown up deeply connected with the earth and inspired her further, and finally Colin, who, like her, had been neglected. They healed each other as they revitalized the garden, experiencing the joys of mother earth.

It reinforced my own faith in mother… show more.

This book is special to me as it was the first book that really fired up my desire to write! I was a little girl and the edition my parents brought me came with a cute skeleton key necklace which I still have. I like to think that my obsession with mysterious gardens, vintage things, and skeleton keys all come from having read this beautiful book. 

This is a children’s classic and was one of my favorite books when I was about ten years old. It’s not a fantasy, like my other suggestions, but as a child, the concept of finding this beautiful, wild, secret garden felt absolutely magical and fantastical. It’s what every kid imagines - amazing secret places and magical hideaways. The author also focused on concepts of friendship, family, and belonging in a way that really spoke to me as a child. I read this book multiple times as a kid and love it to this day. I’d even suggest it to adults… show more.

I've always loved this story, written more than 100 years ago, Mary Lennox is an unwanted ten-year-old growing up in India who is looked after by native servants. As a result, she becomes spoilt, demanding, and self-centered. When a cholera epidemic kills her parents, Mary is discovered all alone in her house and sent to Yorkshire to live with a reclusive uncle called Archibald Craven.

In this story, there are cultural differences, and an unhappy and unlovable child. How can Mary change and grow, and emerge from this situation?

As a young girl, this story hooked me with its historical other-worldliness as well as its promise of a dark secret. There is something about the walled garden that has strong symbolic or archetypal resonance, and in this story, the secret garden becomes a site of discovery and of buried loss and renewal or healing. It’s an enduring truth that tending to a garden is soulfully regenerative and this story delivers this with a climactic happy ending encompassing all-around transformations to both garden, ailing son Colin, spoilt orphan Mary, and grief-stricken father Archibald.