What We Lose When We Lost the Plot

What We Lose When We Lost the Plot

“Might I,” said Mary, “have a bit of earth?” It’s one of the most quietly revolutionary questions in children’s literature. When Mary Lennox asks for a bit of earth in The Secret Garden, she’s not demanding wealth, or freedom, or even love. She asks for something older and humbler: a patch of ground to call her own, to tend and watch, to know by the shape of its weeds and the smell of its soil. She asks to belong. Once, we all had—or at least …