The Secret Garden

“I hate it here so I will go to secret gardens in my mind”

The image of retreating to a "secret garden" reaches back to Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 novel, in which a neglected walled garden becomes the private, restorative world its lonely children bring back to life. In the song the secret garden is the same kind of enclosed inner refuge, a place the speaker escapes into when the outer world is unbearable, which is why a community reader hears Burnett's book behind the line.