The Thammasat University Library owns copies of a popular children’s book, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, first published in 1911.

Frances Hodgson Burnett was an English–American playwright and author. She also wrote such well-remembered tales as A Little Princess and Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Mary Lennox, the 10-year-old heroine of The Secret Garden, is a little British orphan orphan, but unlike most orphans children’s books, she is not very nice. Instead she is spoiled and sometimes is guilty of mean and even violent behavior.

After living for a short time in India, she moves to Yorkshire, the United Kingdom, to live with an uncle, where she is disrespectful to the servants.

She also complains about the quality of English food.

She begins to wonder about a locked-up garden on the grounds of her uncle’s estate, and finds a key that allows her to explore it.

As she learns about the people who care for the garden, she becomes a more polite human being.

The secret garden brings health and happiness to the characters of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s story.

In addition to different editions of the novel, the TU Library collection also includes a Hollywood film adaptation starring the child actress Margaret O’Brien, which may be seen at the Rewat Buddhinan Audiovisual Center on the Underground 2 level of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

Released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios and directed by Fred M. Wilcox, this version of The Secret Garden is one of the most valued, due to the performance by Margaret O’Brien.

There have been other film adaptations of The Secret Garden, most recently last year, starring Colin Firth, and Julie Walters.

There has also been a Japanese anime adaptation of the novel entitled Anime Himitsu no Hanazono.

Here are some excerpts from The Secret Garden to show how Frances Hodgson Burnett’s writing style created characters. Describing how Mary Lennox was rarely seen by her parents, who did not bother to visit the nursery where she was raised by servants, Burnett writes:

Perhaps if her mother had carried her pretty face and her pretty manners oftener into the nursery Mary might have learned some pretty ways too.

Chapter 2

When Mary Lennox moves from India to the cold climate of Yorkshire, UK, the change affects her in this way:

In India she had always felt hot and too languid to care much about anything. The fact was that the fresh wind from the moor had begun to blow the cobwebs out of her young brain and to waken her up a little.

Chapter 5

As Mary starts to understand more about life and the lives of other people, she develops into a more sensitive person:

At that moment a very good thing was happening to her. Four good things had happened to her, in fact, since she came to Misselthwaite Manor. She had felt as if she had understood a robin and that he had understood her; she had run in the wind until her blood had grown warm; she had been healthily hungry for the first time in her life; and she had found out what it was to be sorry for some one. She was getting on.

Chapter 5

Here is another example of how Mary Lennox changed from being a selfish person to one who cares more for others, when she meets another young person who is in a bad mood:

Mary’s lips pinched themselves together. She was no more used to considering other people than Colin was and she saw no reason why an ill-tempered boy should interfere with the thing she liked best. She knew nothing about the pitifulness of people who had been ill and nervous and who did not know that they could control their tempers and need not make other people ill and nervous, too. When she had had a headache in India she had done her best to see that everybody else also had a headache or something quite as bad. And she felt she was quite right; but of course now she felt that Colin was quite wrong.

Chapter 10

The overall philosophy of The Secret Garden is expressed as not allowing ourselves to be controlled by negative thoughts:

In each century since the beginning of the world wonderful things have been discovered. In the last century more amazing things were found out than in any century before. In this new century hundreds of things still more astounding will be brought to light. 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. 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.

Chapter 27

There have been international library exhibits celebrating The Secret Garden, such as Cultivating Secret Gardens: Frances Hodgson Burnett and Children’s Fiction (2011) cosponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities, the Department of English, and the Friends of the Dartmouth College Library, New Hampshire, USA.

Based on the novel, some gardeners have developed the idea of a secret garden which is used to cure people of ailments or give them a place to rest and relax.

A secret garden, or one that most people do not know about, may have therapeutic qualities. The adjective therapeutic, meaning having to do with healing, derives from a Greek term meaning to treat medically.

Some libraries have been built recently with secret gardens included to offer readers a place to rest and think. These include the Vancouver Public Library in Canada, which opened in 2018.

Also the Library of Birmingham, UK, which was intended to provide green spaces in the heart of the city. They are planted with a variety of species to provide colour and interest throughout the year.

Thailand and Secret Gardens

Although TU students are familiar with the small garden space on the Underground 3 level of the Pridi Banomyong Library, there are other secret gardens in the Kingdom. One is The Secret Garden in the hills of Koh Samui, built by a local Samui fruit farmer, Nim Thongsuk, who began building in 1976.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)