Gardeners and book lovers alike will delight in this colorful survey. 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. “If she had stayed, The Secret Garden might never have been written,” McDowell asserts, because it was created in its memory. 12 2021 by Marta McDowell (Author) 694 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle Edition 3.99 Read with Our Free App Audiobook 0.00 Free with your Audible trial Hardcover 32.22 17 Used from 13.01 20 New from 22. McDowell also shares details of three gardens Hodgson Burnett created in Kent, Long Island, and Bermuda. Unearthing The Secret Garden: The Plants and Places That Inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett Hardcover Oct. Unearthing the Secret Garden: The Plants and Places That Inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett BUY THIS BOOK Unearthing the Secret Garden: The Plants and Places That Inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett.

When Maytham’s owner sold the hall, Burnett returned bereft to New York, where she had spent part of her girlhood. Unearthing the Secret Garden is Marta McDowell’s gorgeous, deeply felt tribute to the timeless tale. Unearthing The Secret Garden starts by chronicling Frances Hodgson Burnett’s childhood and early life, with a focus on her growing interest in gardens and her development as a writer.

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. 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. 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. Affectionate and informative, Unearthing the Secret Garden is not unlike a garden itself, with its smooth lawns of prose and striking shows of illustration and photography.

Unearthing the secret garden