The Magic Garden

I remember the day in third or fourth grade when my teacher read The Secret Garden aloud to our class. I wanted to read ahead, so as soon as I got home I went up to the attic and looked through a big box of my mother's books, and found The Magic Garden by Gene Stratton-Porter. I figured that it must be the same book, so I brought it downstairs and started to read it. I supposed that my teacher must have skipped the beginning part, since this book was so very different, but then I found myself forgetting about the neglected and unloved girl in India, and becoming deeply attached to the neglected and unloved American girl named Amaryllis in this novel. I was completely hooked by the introduction of John Guido Forrester, a boy who imitates the sounds of birds and sheep on his violin.

Hmm. Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote her novel in 1911, and Gene Stratton-Porter wrote her novel--her last of dozens--in 1926. I imagine that there could have been some influence. The Magic Garden was recently digitized (2022), so I am very happy that I can share the whole text (the link is above).

Finding a physical copy of this book was nearly impossible for me in the days before the internet. Michael somehow managed to find me a copy in the late 1980s, and gave it to me as a present. He read the whole book to me out loud, and his very John Guido-esque gesture really did help soothe my "hungry heart."

Here's the section (it begins on page 47) where John Guido is introduced:

Then she heard something. Something coming. It seemed as if it were coming down the brook, and yet it could not be coming down the brook, because what she heard was music. Amaryllis knew about music. She had seen people play pianos and harps and violins. She had heard bands and orchestras. She knew about the instruments that you blew in one end and wonderful tones came out of the other. Her governess played tunes on the piano for her to dance to. She knew what this music coming toward her was. Times when her mother had been having a party, men, or sometimes women, had played on violins standing beside the grand piano in the music room. She knew a violin, but she had never heard a violin played the way this one was played. This violin played like sunshine and flowers in bloom. Sometimes it stayed in the same place quite a while. When a bird up on a branch very carefully said, “Pee-a-wee! Pee-a-wee!” right over after it the violin said the same thing. When a lamb across the meadow said, “Baa-a-a ah!” the violin said, “Baa-a-a-ah!” too. That was a joke making a violin talk like a bird and baa like a sheep.

Amaryllis stepped from the shoal and started up the stream to find the violin that sounded like magic. It was rather rough going. Some of the stones that looked so perfectly nice to step on were not nice at all. Something slippery was on the tops of them that tried to throw her down, but soap had been good practice. She never fell once. The pebbly places were the safest, but there were not always pebbly places to step on, and sometimes she just had to step on the slippery rocks to get ahead. The bushes and shrubs were coming more thickly willows and elders and button bushes and all sorts of things that Amaryllis never had seen before, not to be right up to them and to touch them with her fingers. But because she was going up stream and the violin was coming down stream, it was not so very long before she found it.

Amaryllis’s mouth fell open and her eyes grew very wide because, when she found the violin, she found something else she had not reckoned on. She had thought maybe it was a magic violin that was floating through the air and playing tunes all by itself the way the water sang gay tunes, and the birds sang glad notes, and the flowers made little waves of colour music. So when Amaryllis got her first sight of the violin, her mouth fell open the widest it ever had, and her eyes grew the biggest and roundest they had ever been, because that violin was right out in the middle or the brook, and that violin was in the hands of a boy, and the boy had a head as black as the blackest wing on the blackest blackbird that came down to the brook to bathe and drink. He had eyes big and round and wide open and almost as black as his hair, while his cheeks were a soft, creamy colour, and there were splashes of red in them. His mouth was red and his teeth were even and white. He was tall and slender. He must have been three or four years older than [Amarylis's brother] Peter. He wore a gray shirt and gray linen trousers rolled up above his knees and held with a belt at his waist. His feet were bare and he was standing in the water.

He was looking up at the sky and all around him, and every note that a bird sang, and every “Moo-o” that a cow called, and every “‘Baa-a”’ that a sheep made, he repeated on the violin. Sometimes he would look down at the brook and make the violin laugh and chuckle and leap down a steep place and whirl out into a shallow pool and chuckle between stones and warble over pebbles. It was the funniest thing. Nothing like it ever had been done before in all the world—-not in any pictures in all the stacks of picture books of which Amaryllis was dead tired.

Then, standing there in a pause, when the birds had forgotten and the sheep were quiet, the boy began to play his own music. But Amaryllis did not like what he played then, because the notes he made were the thoughts that were in her brain spoken on a violin, when worst of all she wanted to sit on somebody’s lap and lean her head on somebody’s breast. Amaryllis had gotten to the place where she did not care the least little bit whose lap she sat on, or whose breast pillowed her, just so it was someone that wanted a little girl, someone who loved all little children. So when the notes grew so lonesome and so hungry that they told Amaryllis that this boy wanted to sit on someone’s lap and put his arms around someone’s neck and kiss someone with those soft red lips of his, Amaryllis started bravely through a rather deep place right up Roaring Brook toward the boy.

When he heard her and looked down at her and took the violin from beneath his chin and smiled at her, Amaryllis walked up to him and held up her hand. In a rough little voice, because of the hard spot in her throat, she said to the boy: “Aren’t you got anyone to love you, either?”

The boy looked down at her and said: “Not today.”

Amaryllis looked up at him and said: “Then I’m worser off than you, cause I haven’t anyone any day.”

I started thinking about John Guido while using my violin to try to communicate with a bird who lives in our yard with a song that the Merlin app fails to recognize. It comes back year after year singing the same three-note song. My bird-wise friend Ruth has suggested that it might be a bluebird with a singular song. I love the idea of a unique bird who knows s/he is being "heard" in our yard. All the better if it happens to be a blue bird!

This is a piccolo rendering of it, though it seems to sound an octave higher. And here it is as recorded in another part of our neighborhood.

Anyone with an ear for birds reading this who might have some idea how to identify our bird friend, please leave a comment!