Summer

Summer is the season in which Kay and Gerda’s shared childhood first flourishes and, at the story’s end, the season that frames their homecoming. Its roses and warmth stand against winter’s separation and the bleakness of autumn, while a garden held in perpetual bloom shows how summer’s abundance can also conceal the passage of time.

The Season of the Rooftop Garden

In the crowded town where Kay and Gerda live, their families have little room: each occupies a garret, and the children’s garden consists of wooden boxes placed across the water-pipe between their windows. Sweet-peas trail over the boxes, and rose branches are trained around the windows until they meet in a leafy arch. Summer makes this improvised space a place where the children can sit together beneath the roses or cross from one window to the other with a single jump. Their closeness is given a particular setting: not a spacious garden of their own, but a small shared refuge above the town.

The garden changes with the season. In winter, the children cannot enjoy it in the same way; sometimes the windows freeze over, and they warm copper pennies on the stove to melt small holes in the panes so they can see one another. Summer, by contrast, allows them to meet directly and sit among the flowers. The seasonal difference makes warmth more than a background detail: it determines how easily they can be together, and gives the roses a place in their earliest memories.

Summer, Roses, and Childhood Faith

After the Snow Queen appears to Kay, frost gives way to spring. Green leaves return, swallows build their nests, and the children go back to the rooftop garden. The roses bloom beautifully through that summer. Gerda has learned a hymn about roses, and she sings it with Kay; afterward they hold hands, kiss the roses, and speak toward the sunshine as if the Christ-child were present. The scene joins the season’s visible renewal to the children’s shared religious imagination. The flowers are not simply decoration: they prompt a song through which the children connect what blossoms and fades with the hope expressed in The Rose and Christ Child Hymn.

Summer also holds the last scene of ordinary play before Kay’s corruption becomes evident. As the children look at a picture-book of animals and birds, he suddenly says that something has struck his heart and that there is something in his eye. The shard in his eye changes what he sees: he calls the roses ugly, notices their flaws, kicks the boxes, and pulls off both roses. The warm, flowering setting therefore sharpens the reversal. The same roses that had belonged to shared play and song become targets for Kay’s newly distorted judgment, while Gerda’s concern for him contrasts with his dismissal of what they had cherished together.

A Garden That Hides Time

The Conjuring woman’s garden offers a distorted version of summer’s abundance. There, flowers of every season bloom at once, and Gerda plays in warm sunshine for many days. She knows the flowers, yet senses that one is missing without being able to identify it. The garden’s unchanging plenty keeps her from remembering Kay: the Conjuring woman has made the roses at home sink into the earth because she fears they would recall him to Gerda. A rose left on the woman’s hat betrays the concealment. When Gerda recognizes it, she searches the garden, finds no roses, and weeps over the place where one had been buried; her tears bring the rose-tree back into bloom and restore her memory of Kay.

The garden’s perpetual flowering makes summer feel detached from the calendar. Gerda does not notice the season changing while she remains there. Once she escapes through the garden door, she looks back and discovers that summer has ended and autumn is far advanced. Her realization turns the garden’s comfort into a cost: its endless warmth has not stopped time but hidden it, along with the urgency of her search. Outside, yellow willow-leaves, falling dew, and dropping leaves make the change unmistakable. The contrast distinguishes the real seasonal cycle from a protected enclosure that only seems timeless.

Return to Summer

On the homeward journey, spring appears as Kay and Gerda travel hand in hand toward their town. They recognize the church steeples and hear the bells as they return to their Grandmother’s room. The roses outside are again in full bloom, and the little chairs from their childhood remain there. The familiar objects link the ending to the rooftop garden and the life from which they were separated, even though the children themselves have grown into a man and a woman.

The final image is summer, warm and beautiful, with Kay and Gerda grown up yet children at heart. The return does not erase their passage through separation; instead, it brings them back to the roses and the childhood faith associated with them. In the room, their Grandmother reads a biblical passage about becoming like little children, and the pair understand the words of the old hymn. Summer thus closes the seasonal pattern begun in the town: it is first the season of shared innocence, then a setting in which that bond is broken, and finally the season of reunion. Its recurrence gives the ending a sense of renewal without pretending that time has stood still.