The Song of Solomon The Old Testament's ecstatic lover finds a walled garden as the only adequate metaphor for his beloved. "A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed". In the garden grow "an orchard of pomegranates . . . spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense". And he has the only key.
Le Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris In this medieval allegorical poem, the lover, in quest of the Rose (ie his beloved), arrives at a beautiful orchard enclosed by a high wall. This is the walled garden of the god of love. The garden contains wonderful, burgeoning plants, but its walls carry images of life's sufferings.
The Merchant's Tale by Chaucer
Silly old January marries teenager May, who is soon making eyes at the young squire, Damian. Where can they meet? January has made a walled garden for his wife, and May tells her paramour to wait in the pear tree. Her husband has been struck blind and actually helps her into the tree. But as wife and squire make love, he regains his sight.
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
"It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place anyone could imagine." When her parents die, lonely, sour little Mary Lennox has to live with her uncle at Misselthwaite Manor. She finds a key and a robin shows her the door to his secret garden. In she steps to a magical world, entirely enclosed by high walls, where she will come to life.
Paradise Lost by John Milton
God surrounds "delicious Paradise" with a "verdurous wall", enclosing his blessed but vulnerable human couple. From the outside Satan can see "higher than that wall a circling row / Of goodliest trees loaden with fairest fruit". There is only one gate, but the "arch-felon" jumps over the highest part of the wall, ready to begin his bad work.
The Magician's Nephew by CS Lewis
Digory travels to a walled garden in the Narnian mountains where apple trees grow. A rhyme above the gates warns him, "Come in my gold gates or not at all / Take of my fruit for others or forbear / For those who steal or those who climb my wall / Shall find their heart's desire and find despair". Which fruit will save his mother's life?
Pamela by Samuel Richardson
Lustful Mr B takes his sexy but virtuous servant Pamela away to his Lincolnshire estate. She is allowed to walk in the walled garden, and plots her escape. She gets a key but can't turn the lock. She tries to climb the wall, but succeeds only in bringing a brick down on her head. The beautiful garden is a prison.
"Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Rappaccini is a nasty botanist in medieval Padua, who confines his daughter Beatrice to a walled garden filled with poisonous plants. Her lover, Giovanni, gets in, but finds that Beatrice has soaked up so much poison that she has become poisonous. A friendly professor procures an antidote, but will it work?
"The Selfish Giant" by Oscar Wilde
The giant comes back from a seven-year sojourn in Cornwall and is furious to find children playing in his garden. He builds a high wall all round it, and it is condemned to perpetual winter until the children get back in through a hole in the wall and spring returns.
"The Cottage Hospital" by John Betjeman
"At the end of a long-walled garden in a red provincial town", the poet lies under "blackening branches where the mulberry leaves hung down . . ." Apple and plum espaliers "basked upon bricks of brown", and the sounds of playing children drift in from the street beyond the wall – prompting a gloomy fantasy about impending death.
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