butterfly

Butterflies are among the small, quick creatures that signal the return of life to the moor and to the secret garden. They are first invoked by Martha Sowerby when she tries to explain to Mary Lennox what the Yorkshire moor is like in its finest season. Martha tells Mary that when the gorse, broom, and heather are in flower, the moor is full of "hundreds o' butterflies flutterin'" alongside bees humming and skylarks soaring. The image is meant to counter Mary's initial hatred of the bare, windy landscape, and it plants in her mind the promise of a world that is not gray and dead but teeming with color and motion.

Butterflies in the Garden's Reawakening

Months later, after Mary has discovered the secret garden and begun to work in it with Dickon, butterflies become part of the sensory vocabulary she uses to describe the garden's transformation to Colin, who has never seen such things. When Colin asks her how she knows so much about the moor, Mary explains that when Dickon talks about it, "you feel as if you saw things and heard them" — and among the things she names are the gorse smelling like honey and the air "all full of bees and butterflies." The butterfly here is not a single observed specimen but a component of a living atmosphere, inseparable from the warmth, scent, and sound that Colin has been denied.

The Columbine and the Butterfly

The most specific association of butterflies with the garden's flowers comes when Dickon identifies the plants already growing in the secret garden. Pointing to a picture of aquilegia, he tells Colin and Mary that the country name for it is columbine and that there are "some big clumps o' columbine in th' garden." He adds that when the flowers are out, "they'll look like a bed o' blue an' white butterflies flutterin'." The comparison works both ways: the flowers resemble butterflies, and the butterflies, when they come, will seem like moving flowers. It is a moment of pure, delighted observation, and it is one of the details that makes Colin long to see the garden for himself.

Narrative Significance

Butterflies never act as agents in the plot; they are not tamed or named like the robin, the fox Captain, or the rook Soot. Their role is atmospheric and symbolic. They belong to the category of "wild things" that Dickon understands without needing to capture or control them. For Mary, who arrived from India knowing nothing of English springs, and for Colin, who has spent his life indoors, butterflies represent the kind of beauty that cannot be ordered or prescribed — it simply arrives when the garden is allowed to live. Their presence in Martha's early speech and in Dickon's later descriptions forms a thread that connects the promise of spring to its fulfillment, and they help make the secret garden a place where even the smallest, most fleeting creatures have their place in the "Big Good Thing" that Susan Sowerby says is at work in the world.