Mary pushed the leaves aside and found a round door knob. Her hands shook. She turned the key twice, and the door opened slowly. She was inside the secret garden, and nobody had stood there for ten years. Grey stems climbed over everything, and the grass was brown, and the roses had grown wild. Mary thought it was the sweetest place in the world. She knelt down and looked closely at the earth. Little pale green points were pushing up through the dirt, and they were alive. She cleared the weeds away from them with her fingers. It is not a dead garden, she said aloud. She came back every day, and she told no one, and for the first time in her life Mary Lennox had something of her own.