The Same Soil: A Continuation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden

An elegiac return to the world of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, a generation on and in the long shadow of the Great War — a novel of the loves the world leaves no room for, and the stubborn green that rises, every spring, out of the most broken ground.

As children, the three of them brought a walled garden back from the dead — and a dying boy back to life along with it. Mary, the contrary, unwanted orphan; Colin, the heir who was certain he would never walk; and Dickon, the moor-boy who could coax anything to grow, to whom every wild thing came.

A generation later, the war has scattered them. Mary nurses the wounded in England, reading the two men she loves through the careful letters they send her — and never to each other. Colin is an officer in France. And Dickon, who was all hands and all gift and all life, comes home from the front with his right arm gone and the green gone out of him, shut in the dark and sure there is nothing left worth saving.

The garden lies in ruin once more. Now it falls to Mary and Colin to do for Dickon what was once done for them — to drag him, against his will, back toward the light. But the thing quietly taking root between the two men can survive nowhere in England except behind a high old wall; and walls, Mary is learning, must be kept, whatever it costs the keeper.