Unearthing the Secret Garden: The Plants and Places That Inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett

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. (Sept.)