The real Secret Garden

She held back the swinging curtain of ivy and pushed back the door, which opened slowly – slowly. Then she slipped through it and shut it behind her…She was standing inside the secret garden.

The fictional secret garden into which Mary Lennox slips in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel was inspired by a real garden – but one in Kent rather than Yorkshire, where the book is set.

In 1898, Burnett, then wealthy and famous following the huge success of her novel Little Lord Fauntleroy, rented Maytham Hall, a mansion in the village of Rolvenden, on the edge of the Kentish Weald. The house was begun in 1721, completed in 1763 and given a strange mock-Tudor third storey in 1880. Then, in 1893, it and caught fire.

By the time Burnett moved in, it had been repaired and given a neo-Gothic look. “I think I am going to take a place called Maytham Hall,” she wrote to her son Vivian. “It is a charming place with a nicely timbered park and a beautiful old walled kitchen garden.”

It also had an orchard that had run wild and enclosed by 170-year-old high brick walls decorated with ancient lichens. “It was entered by a low arched gateway in the wall, closed by a wooden door,” she wrote and then described how she had transformed it. “The ground underneath the twisted, leaning old apple tree was cleared of all its weeds and thorns and sown with grass and then at every available space roses were planted to climb up the ancient trunks and over the walls.”

The garden fired Burnett’s imagination. Into it, she would take, according to her biographer Ann Thwaite, “her table and chair, her tuffet and rug, and a large Japanese umbrella…for shade if it were needed.”
She worked on several books in her rose garden and there the seeds were sown for a story about a garden that was shut up and abandoned for ten years after a fatal accident involving a swing and a tree. The Secret Garden was not published till 1911, by which time Burnett had been gone from Kent for four years and Maytham had a new owner who commissioned for it a radical classical makeover by the distinguished architect Sir Edwin Lutyens.

As she wrote The Secret Garden, Burnett remembered the robin she met in her Maytham garden, one who would take crumbs form her hand “the instant I opened the little door in the leaf-covered garden wall”. She included in her story an important role for a robin that makes friends with her heroine Mary and eventually shows her where to look for the key that opens the hidden door into the garden. There are still real robins in the Maytham gardens but much has changed since Burnett in her white dress sat writing under her parasol.
The walled garden is now divided in two by a long pergola over a path that leads, in one direction, to a classical statue in a niche and, in the other, to an elegant wrought iron gate that does not figure in Burnett’s own description of the garden and is probably a later addition. On either side of the pergola are well-trimmed lawns and herbaceous borders and in one corner is a brick garden house added by Lutyens.
But what of the door mentioned by Burnett and described by Mary? It’s not there now, although at the end of the west wall is an obvious place where an arched space for a door has been filled with new bricks. And that ghostly shape is where reality (what Burnett saw) and imagination (what she put into her novel) most obviously coincide.

If little remains of what Burnett knew, her passionate descriptions of the garden, both in fiction and in fact, live on. Ann Thwaite records that at the end of her life Burnett said that one of her happiest memories was “of a softly raining spring in Kent when I spent nearly three weeks kneeling on a small rubber mat on the grass edge of a heavenly old herbaceous border bed…[I] tucked softly into the rich sweet damp mould the plants which were to bloom in loveliness for me in the summer. The rain was not constant. It only softly drizzled in a sort of mist on my red frieze garden cloak and hood…”

That almost ecstatic passage is echoed in the novel when Mary describes the secret garden to Colin before he has seen it: “I think it has been left alone so long – that it has grown all into a lovely tangle. I think the roses have climbed and climbed and climbed until they hang form the branches and walls and creep over the ground – almost like a strange grey mist.”

This transcendent quality of The Secret Garden appealed to the pessimistic poet Philip Larkin, who read the book very early one morning in 1953. He wrote in a letter: “If [the novel] has any message, it’s surely that – well, I can’t put it in a sentence, but it’s that life is strong and joyful enough to push up & overturn the strongest and heaviest morbid fancies and fears: it calls on everyone to put aside distrusts and shrinking-back, and live to the utmost while life is for the having.”