Garden of the Conjuring Woman

The Garden of the Conjuring Woman is an enchanted, year-round flower garden that briefly shelters Gerda while also holding her away from Kay. Its warmth and abundance seem generous: flowers bloom in every season, and Gerda spends many happy days among them. Yet the garden’s beauty is part of the Conjuring woman’s plan to keep her there. By removing the roses that connect Gerda to home and allowing the seasons to disappear from view, the garden turns comfort into delay. Gerda’s discovery of the missing roses, and her eventual escape, make it a place where memory is first suppressed and then restored.

Setting and Enchanted Abundance

The garden appears after the Conjuring woman rescues Gerda from the river. She welcomes the girl into her little house, where red, blue, and yellow windowpanes color the daylight, cherries stand on the table, and a golden comb passes through Gerda’s long flaxen hair. The house and garden together offer warmth and care after Gerda’s journey by water. The Conjuring woman invites her to stay, and Gerda, comforted by food and attention, becomes less occupied with Kay.

Beyond the house lies a garden unlike an ordinary seasonal landscape. Every flower that could be imagined for every season is in bloom at once; vivid color and continuous sunshine make it seem more beautiful than a picture-book. Gerda plays there until sunset, sleeps in an elegant bed with red silk pillows embroidered with colored violets, and returns to the flowers over many days. She learns them one by one, but an absence troubles her before she can identify what is missing. The garden offers variety without change: all seasons appear, yet the actual passage of the year is hidden.

Roses Removed and Remembered

The missing flower is a rose. Gerda recognizes one painted on the Conjuring woman’s hat, where it has escaped the removal of the garden’s rose-trees. The oversight exposes the incompleteness of the enchantment: the image of a rose remains even though the living roses have been made to sink into the earth. The Conjuring woman had removed them because she feared they would remind Gerda of the roses at home, and through them of Kay, prompting her to leave. The garden’s apparent abundance is therefore selective. It preserves whatever delights Gerda while excluding what might return her thoughts to her search.

When Gerda searches the flowerbeds and finds no roses, she sits down and weeps. Her tears fall where a rose-tree was buried, and it sprouts again, blooming as it did before. Gerda embraces and kisses the roses; remembering those at home, she remembers Kay and realizes how long she has been detained. The rose’s return does more than fill a gap in the garden. It reconnects the sheltered present with Gerda’s life beyond it, and turns her attention from the flowers to the person she came to find.

The roses answer Gerda’s fear that Kay may be dead: they say he is not among the dead, though they have been in the ground where the dead lie. Their reply gives her reassurance, but not directions. The other flowers likewise cannot tell her where Kay is. Each is absorbed in its own imagined tale, and Gerda hears their stories as she asks them in turn. The flowers’ eloquence does not make them useful guides; their attention remains fixed on their separate visions rather than on Gerda’s urgent question.

The Garden as Delay

The narcissus describes a dancing girl in a little room, attending to her clothes and admiring her own appearance. Gerda rejects this account as irrelevant to her search and runs toward the garden’s door. It is fastened, but the rusty latch yields when she presses against it. The contrast is decisive: the garden has held her through enchantment and comfort, yet her departure comes through an ordinary mechanism that gives way under her effort. Once outside, she looks back three times and sees no one following her.

The garden’s perpetual summer has concealed the time passing beyond it. After running until she can go no farther, Gerda rests on a great stone and realizes that summer is over and autumn is far advanced. Outside the garden, willow leaves are yellow, dew falls, and leaves drop from the trees; only the sloe-thorn still bears fruit, and its sloes are sour. Gerda’s feet are wounded and sore, and the world seems cold and bleak. The sharp change from unseasonal bloom to late autumn measures the cost of her stay: she has been kept from her purpose long enough for the season to turn.

Narrative Significance

The garden’s central contradiction is that its beauty both welcomes and obstructs. The Conjuring woman is not described as a wicked witch; she conjures for amusement and, in this instance, because she wants Gerda to remain with her. Her affection does not prevent her from manipulating the surroundings: she removes the roses specifically to sever the associations that might lead Gerda back to Kay. The garden’s gentle pleasures thus serve a controlling purpose without becoming outwardly threatening.

The episode gives memory a material form. The rose-tree is buried, its absence is felt before it is understood, and Gerda’s tears bring it back into bloom. The garden cannot fully erase the bond with Kay because a painted rose remains, and because Gerda responds to the living flower by remembering home. Its flowers can tell stories, but none can replace the knowledge she seeks; its endless summer can comfort her, but cannot stop autumn from arriving beyond its reach. Once Gerda recognizes both the missing rose and the lost time, the garden ceases to be a refuge and becomes a place she must leave.