“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.” -Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
About a week ago I finished reading The Secret Garden. I read it in elementary school, but when I went to the bookstore Shakespeare and Company here in Paris, I decided on a whim to purchase a copy. I found the book delightful, and since reading it some parts have stuck with me. In particular, I’ve thought about this idea of the garden and its magic.
If you have not read The Secret Garden, I’ll provide a summary. Mary Lennox is a ten year old girl who moves from India to her uncle’s manor in the English countryside when her parents die. Mary is spoiled, disagreeable, and downright rotten. Because she has no friends and her guardians don’t particularly care to look after her, she roams her uncle’s huge and desolate manor. There, she finds a garden that was locked away and hidden. Mary begins to care for the garden, and in doing so she becomes healthier and happier. She gains friends who work on the garden with her, and the garden blooms into a place of true beauty. Mary grows into a kinder, friendlier, and better person because of the garden and its so-called magic.
“Sometimes since I’ve been in the garden I’ve looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden – in all the places.” -Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
The secret garden is the perfect place. It is beautiful, calm, and seems to exist in a realm outside of reality. In a strange way, that is how I think of the gardens and parks in Paris.
Yesterday after lunch, we made our way to a small park with a stunning church overlooking it. The day was sunny and hot, but the park was still filled with people eating their lunch, chatting, or just relaxing. There were lovely flowers and sculptures, a small but cute playground, and a water fountain and restrooms. Then, after the Musée d’Orsay, my friend and I made our way to Tuileries Garden for some gelato. The park was beautiful, and it was clear that everyone was enjoying their time. I saw families and couples, children and the elderly, people from all nationalities and of all races, dressed in different styles and speaking different languages. But we were all there to enjoy the same park.
While sitting in Tuileries Garden, enjoying my gelato, I had a thought: this is what the world should be like.
Gardens and parks are open to all people, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, and so on (at least, these days most are. In the past, parks were certainly restricted to people of certain races, classes, genders, etc.). And parks can be enjoyed by everyone. You don’t need money, unlike a theme park. You don’t need skill, unlike an ice skating rink. You don’t need a certain cultural understanding of fun, unlike golfing. With some forms of recreation, a culture will find some specific activity fun, but others would not. It is fairly universal, however, that everyone enjoys relaxing with loved ones. All people of all ages and of all backgrounds can enjoy the garden.
This sounds like a utopia, and yes, it is. I fully recognize this. Nothing is this perfect. But even so, watching everyone in the parks enjoy themselves, I wished that everywhere could be like that. It made me think of The Secret Garden. There, the garden was a perfect place, untouched by the world’s ugliness or harsh realities. I know I already wrote a blog post about gardens, but I feel strongly about their importance to this city (and The Secret Garden inspired me). I believe that Frances Hodgson Burnett, the book’s author, would heartily approve of the gardens of Paris–maybe she’d even see some of her magic there.
“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
