The Secret Garden

The alchemical vessel must be sealed for the work to proceed, and the garden has been literally locked and buried for a decade, its key hidden in the earth. Mary reopening it is the opening of the retort, the beginning of the opus. What follows tracks the classical stages with startling exactness.

The garden is nigredo when she finds it, black and dead, all thorn and rot, the necessary blackening from which nothing has yet risen. She and Dickon begin the albedo, the whitening, clearing and watering, coaxing the first green from the grey. The four elements are all here and all necessary: the earth she digs, the water she carries, the air the robin rides in on, the sun that finally reaches the beds. The film insists that nothing transforms without labor inside a closed space over real time. By the film's end the garden blazes into rubedo, the reddening, full flower and fruit, and the uncle returns from his grief-exile to find the tomb has become a garden and his dying son is running through it.

Initiation removes the candidate from a dead life and returns them alive, and the film runs three candidates through the rite at once. Mary begins entombed in grief and unlovability. Colin begins entombed in a literal sickroom, told he cannot walk. The uncle begins entombed in mourning so total he has sealed the house against joy. Each is a form of premature burial, and the garden is the ground where each is exhumed.

The rite's mechanism is service. Mary heals by tending something outside herself. Colin heals by being carried into the garden and made to stand in the soil. The buried aunt, whose death sealed the garden, is the presiding figure whose absence the whole operation is meant to answer. When Colin walks and the uncle weeps and the wall is opened for good, three people have completed a passage from the world of the dead back to the living, and the door that was locked to hide a death is left open to admit a life.