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Teachers & SchoolsMan and the Natural World
If you take a minute to think about what a garden really is, you start to see some of the implied tension in this book between humans and the natural world. That is, a garden includes plants, so it is a part of the larger natural world. Importantly, though, a garden is also specifically arranged and kept up by humans. If humans leave a garden alone, it dies off and/or returns to its natural state.
So while a garden represents some kind of communion between humans and the world of growing plants, it also demonstrates our control over these plants and their growing patterns. And in fact, while The Secret Garden lovingly describes the spare, stark landscape of the Yorkshire moors, even that supposedly wild territory is absolutely under human control. Consider Dickon, who is constantly going in there and taming foxes and crows and ponies. Dickon is a great kid, but he is also regularly exerting human control over the natural world.
Now, don't get us wrong, we're not saying that any of this is a bad thing: We love gardens and tamed animals. But while Frances Hodgson Burnett writes often about the pleasure that her characters feel being outside in nature, all of these outdoor landscapes—and most especially the Secret Garden, with its walls—are carefully domesticated and kept under control. It's as though, for characters to feel most at home in the natural world, they have to bring it under their control. It's hard to image how this view of nature would adapt to include huge disasters like tornadoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis.
The Secret Garden emphasizes the pleasures of working in a garden rather than hiking in a forest or working on a farm because it is trying to create a space of homey self-contained fun for Mary and Colin to learn how to be more classically childlike.
The friendliness and ease of the robin as it communicates with its chosen humans contrasts positively with the vain, shallow social worlds of Mary's parents or the stiff, often hostile relationships between Mary, Colin, and their servants and nannies. The Secret Garden uses the robin to imply that human communication is less fulfilling and honest than animal communication.