Restoring our secret gardens

I recently reread what is surely one of the quintessential books about spring: "The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett. First published in 1911, it tells the story of a girl named Mary ("a plain little piece of goods") who, after the death of her parents, is sent back from India to live with her uncle on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors. The uncle, however, is mostly away, and, left to her own devices, Mary explores the many empty rooms of Misselthwaite Manor and the grounds. In the latter she discovers a hidden door that leads to a walled garden. Gradually, with the help of a boy named Dickon, she restores the secret garden, and herself, to life. And then she restores her sickly cousin Colin, whom she has also found, hidden away in one of the rooms.

After more than four decades, certain images in the book were as fresh and vivid as the day I first read them, sitting in my parents' house on the edge of the Scottish moors: "the plump little scarlet-waistcoated" robin, the garden itself, the magical Dickon who can talk to animals and birds. I had almost forgotten about Colin, who, in the second half of the narrative, becomes the main focus and who was, perhaps, the author's focus all along. The death of Burnett's teenage son, Lionel, from consumption in 1890, was the single most tragic event in her tumultuous life. In her novel she accomplished what she longed for: his resurrection.

The garden has long been, in many different religions and cultures, a symbol of paradise - a place where the dead are made whole and enjoy the afterlife - or at least a place of peace and contemplation. In my life, however, gardening is neither idyllic nor contemplative. My father used to wage war on slugs, luring them to their death with saucers of beer, and also on rabbits, vaguely firing a rifle in their direction; the woods and moors were always trying to creep under the garden fence.

In North Cambridge, despite the trimmings of civilization, I have numerous adversaries: squirrels eat my bulbs, skunks dig up my small "lawn," slugs devour my petunias, rubbish blows in from the street, the balls of local children topple my sunflowers, and weeds are rampant. Even if I get all of these somewhat under control, suddenly in June, in a very un-Scottish way, the weather gets too hot.

In "The Secret Garden," neither weeds nor predators hinder Mary's efforts; moreover she has little else to do with her long days. But my life is already too busy - so why, in the face of such difficulties, am I lavishing time and money on a few square yards of soil? I could buy flowers every week, all year long, for the amount I spend on plants and fertilizer and paraphernalia. Or, more usefully, give the money to charity.

But, even as I sit here typing, my peonies are calling like sirens, begging me to remove last year's dead stalks and leaves. I feel that I would be a bad person if I ignored them; I would be failing to care for a living thing that is in my charge. At a time when we are surrounded - bombarded even - with bad news and overwhelming problems, this seems particularly contrary. Perhaps it is also even more necessary.

I do not share Burnett's belief in theosophy and life forces, but, after the long winter, I pause each spring to engage with the earth turning. In my garden, I welcome each hardy plant and celebrate what may be the only beauty we have: the beauty of the imperfect.

Margot Livesey, a guest columnist, is a novelist and teaches at Emerson College. Her most recent novel is "The House on Fortune Street."