The Secret Garden
The unwanted child of socialites in colonial India roams a British compound. Total silence, except for the buzzing of insects. A dreadful cholera epidemic has taken everyone away – except for ten-year-old Mary Lennox. She is a survivor. What to do with this spoiled and unpleasant child? Best to send her off to England, as a ward of her widowed uncle, Archibald Craven, owner of Misselthwaite Manor.
So begins “The Secret Garden”, a classic of English children’s literature, recently made into a movie for the fourth time since it was written by Frances Burnett in 1911. What is Mary’s fate at her strange new home? She continues roaming, exploring the estate which is definitely a mysterious place. During the day, housekeepers are secretive. At night, there are screams behind locked doors. But Mary is not only a survivor – she is a curious survivor. This pays off when she finds not a ghost inhabiting the manor’s gloomiest tract, but rather a real live boy – Colin, her cousin, bedridden, crippled.
Mary and Colin (in a wheelchair) soon make a discovery which changes their lives forever. Behind stone walls, overhung with climbing roses, the two come upon a secret garden and begin to lovingly tend it. Garden tools are provided by household employees and – lo and behold – as time goes by, not only the garden is transformed, but so are the children! Indeed, Mary’s sallow cheeks take on a blossom. Colin even begins to walk again!
Such is the healing power of a garden. Are you familiar with garden therapy? At the Donau University Krems in Lower Austria, two-year academic courses are offered to qualify people to become garden therapists. Their goal is to harness the healing powers of nature to enhance our physical and also our psychological well-being.
Where might urbanites go to enjoy such benefits? Strolling along a river embankment or through a public park are possibilities for city-dwellers to (re)connect with nature. But these alternatives are still not the same as nurturing an honest-to-goodness garden, are they? It seems to me, especially the urban youth of today needs to experience the joy and wonder of plucking a ripe tomato from the vine. How to enable this? One solution was presented to me last summer by a middle-school biology teacher in Coventry, Ohio. His school had a large, vacant classroom, so they decided to enlist the help of a company called Cropking, specializing in hydroponic gardens. (Hydroponics is a method of growing plants in a water-based, nutrient-rich solution instead of having the plants grow in soil.) Over the summer, Cropking installed all the necessary equipment for the pupils to convert what was an empty room into a lush garden! Visitors now find them tending parsley & cucumbers, lettuce, herbs, etc. The hydroponic garden is a hit! It not only supplies the school cafeteria with fresh produce but also offers an opportunity to experience gardening firsthand. For faculty, it is a gathering place with an overwhelming smell of basil! Isn’t it great that technology can provide us – and our children – with such opportunities, even under perhaps less than ideal circumstances?
What was it Thomas Jefferson said about gardening? “No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of a garden. For though I am an old man, I am but a young gardener.” Did Jefferson mean to say that garden therapy made him feel like a boy again? I like to think so!