Lessons from the garden

A memory unlocked, herbaceous garden blessings, bright contrasting flavors, and power of belief.

Aug 20, 2023

∙ Paid

A hidden garden stumbled upon in June, behind a one thousand year old chapel in the Dordogne. Just a little church on a little road in the middle of nowhere caused me to slam my breaks and explore for an hour.

The Stylist just released an article announcing a film that “many Millennials now consider a cultural touchstone” is having a big birthday this year. No, not The Brave Little Toaster, but Agnieszka Holland’s 1993 classic The Secret Garden.

30. Years. Old.

My memories are vidid and iridescent of that sweltering August day. My grandmother shoved all five grandchildren (at the time, there are more now) into her car and we escaped the blistering south Texas sunshine for an afternoon at the cold, dark, soon to be tear filled cinema. From the moment the deserts of India and later the Yorkshire moors appeared on the screen, I was entranced. Desolation and absence of life were themes even a seven year old mind could grasp. For weeks afterward I would introduce myself on the playground with “I was born in India. It was hot, and strange, and lonely in India. I didn’t like it.”

And look who later became President of the Drama Club.

The remote Gothic estate Misselthwaite Manor loomed over the haunted Yorkshire moors, like a sleeping giant over his kingdom of terrified subjects. Late at night the stone walls would echo cries from “ghosts,” voices we’d later discover belonged an invalid cousin, hidden away in the dark and left to die by a mourning parent. A fat little robin provided Mary the treasure map, like a siren call to to adventure, towards the locked and long forgotten door. In the gloom of her newly orphaned existence we found something unexpected… a bit of earth.

A key, hidden in a dust-encrusted bedchamber opened the way to a garden, nestled under the ruins leftover from Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the monasteries. A tiny detail for all whom love history, and that I will forever remain grateful to the set designers.

After swearing him to absolute secrecy, Mary allows Dickon into the beloved new discovery. After scraping through frost to the bright green wick living under the apparent dead trees, he proudly exclaimed:

“It’s alive. It’s full of life.”

A garden door is hope. It is the promise of creation in the making. Through the door locked and left neglected, we were shown the power of believing.

Magical realism blooms throughout The Secret Garden, and the novel’s original message of “mind over matter” may be catalyst as to why we are so focused on actions of manifestation, and the prevailing belief that words are magic.

“At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done--then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live... surprising things can happen to any one who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one place.

"Where you tend a rose, my lad, A thistle cannot grow.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

We abandoned the theatre and life was forever altered. The walk back to the car in the 105°F / 43°C heat, I was changed. My mindset, if you could call it that at seven years old, was a garden in and of itself.

Why are we discussing this and not food? We’ll get to that.

30 years on, we look to our Manifestation Boards. We write down our goals, our dreams, the longings our souls cherish like lily bulbs, ready to be planted just when the time is right. We pray for rain. We rejoice in the sunshine. We keep believing in these lives we’re so carefully pruning. The weeds needs to be eradicated, that which does not suit us or allow us to thrive discarded. We’re allowed to transition into new pots to bloom further, to root into the earth and make our place in the world known.

If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden. You’ve had the power all along, my dear.

ASF xx