The Secret Garden
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50 free The Secret Garden trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Secret Garden has been read aloud at bedtimes for more than a century, and it still works because its heroine starts out so thoroughly unlikeable. Mary Lennox arrives in England sour, spoiled and alone. A locked door, a boy who talks to animals and a hidden invalid slowly change her, and she changes them in return. This quiz follows the whole story, from Mary's lonely start in India to the final scene at the garden door. Expect questions on the characters and their animals, the household staff, the local dialect and the details that readers remember years later. Others cover the woman who wrote the novel, where her idea came from, and the screen and stage versions, including the 1949 Hollywood film. It suits a class that has just finished the novel, a reading group, or anyone who loved the story as a child and wants to find out how much of it stayed with them. The questions start easy and get harder, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which disease kills Mary Lennox's parents in India at the start of The Secret Garden?
Cholera
Cholera kills so many so fast that the surviving servants flee the bungalow. Mary is simply forgotten until officers find her standing alone in the nursery.
Q 02Which bird leads Mary Lennox to the long-lost key and the hidden door in The Secret Garden?
A robin
A robin shows Mary where the rusty key lies and, soon after, the door itself. The author based him on a real bird that kept her company while she wrote outdoors in England.
Q 03Mary Lennox's uncle in The Secret Garden lives on the edge of a moor in which English county?
Yorkshire
Yorkshire gives the book its speech as well as its setting. Mary comes to love the broad local dialect and tries to learn to speak it herself.
Q 04Which novelist began The Secret Garden while planning a garden for her own home on Long Island?
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Frances Hodgson Burnett called it her favourite of her own novels. Even so, her obituaries in 1924 passed over the book in silence.
Q 05Which word do other children in The Secret Garden use when they tease Mary Lennox with a rhyme?
Contrary
Contrary stuck so firmly that the author's working title for the whole novel was Mistress Mary. The clergyman's son Basil starts the teasing.
Q 06How are Mary Lennox and the bedridden Colin Craven related to each other in The Secret Garden?
Cousins
Cousins, because Colin's late mother was the sister of Mary's father. A 1987 TV film cut the family tie so the pair could fall in love as adults.
Q 07What did Archibald Craven do with the key after locking his late wife's garden in The Secret Garden?
Buried it
Buried it, and for ten years nobody knew where. A dog digging for a mole finally turned up the soil and left the key showing.
Q 08Which actress earned a BAFTA nomination as the stern housekeeper in the 1993 film The Secret Garden?
Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for the role. The British Film Institute later put the film on its list of 50 to see by the age of 14.
Q 09Which actor played Archibald Craven in the 2020 film The Secret Garden, decades after appearing in a 1987 TV version?
Colin Firth
Colin Firth had a brief part in the 1987 TV film as the grown-up Colin Craven. That means he has now played both the son and the father.
Q 10In which Roald Dahl book does the young heroine name The Secret Garden her favourite children's book?
Matilda
Matilda has read every children's book in her village library by the age of four and a quarter. She rates this one the best of them all.
Q 11What is the name of the hundred-room house on the moor where Mary Lennox goes to live in The Secret Garden?
Misselthwaite Manor
Misselthwaite Manor is six hundred years old, and most of its rooms stay shut up and locked. Mary spends one rainy day wandering its corridors alone.
Q 12Which stern housekeeper meets Mary Lennox in London and takes her north by train in The Secret Garden?
Mrs. Medlock
Mrs. Medlock went to school with Dickon's mother. She tells her master she would always take that woman's advice about children.
Q 13Which young housemaid, Dickon's sister, first tells Mary Lennox about the locked garden in The Secret Garden?
Martha
Q 21What kind of animal is Captain, the orphan Dickon rescued and tamed on the moor in The Secret Garden?
A fox
A fox cub that Dickon found half-drowned in its hole after its mother was killed, Captain was carried home inside the boy's shirt to keep warm.
Q 22In the novel The Secret Garden, which bird is Soot, the tame black companion that follows Dickon everywhere?
A crow
A crow that Dickon found half-drowned and tamed, Soot is named for being so black. The 1949 film gives the boy a raven instead.
Q 23What is Dickon playing to an audience of wild animals when Mary Lennox first meets him in The Secret Garden?
A wooden pipe
A wooden pipe, rough and simple, has a cock pheasant and two rabbits creeping close to listen. Dickon rises very slowly so that he will not scare them.
Martha is amazed that a girl of Mary's age cannot dress herself. Her wages go home to help feed a family of twelve children.
Q 14Which flowers did Colin Craven's mother grow over the walls and trees of her garden in The Secret Garden?
Roses
Roses meant so much to her that the old gardener kept slipping in to prune them once or twice a year after the door was locked.
Q 15In the novel The Secret Garden, what accident in the walled garden led to the death of Colin Craven's mother?
A branch gave way
A branch gave way beneath her on an old tree she used as a seat, and she died the next day. In the 1949 film the bough falls on her instead.
Q 16What name does Colin Craven give the force he says makes the plants grow in The Secret Garden?
Magic
Magic is something Colin decides to test as a scientific experiment. He sits everyone cross-legged under a tree and chants that it is inside him.
Q 17How does Colin Craven travel when Dickon first takes him outdoors to the hidden garden in The Secret Garden?
In a wheelchair
In a wheelchair pushed by Dickon, after the strongest footman carries him downstairs. Colin first orders every gardener to keep clear of the path.
Q 18What plant has grown over the door of the locked garden, hiding it from Mary Lennox, in The Secret Garden?
Trailing ivy
Trailing ivy hangs over it like a loose curtain. A gust of wind swings the trails aside, and Mary spots the round knob of the door underneath.
Q 19Whose shocked remark about crooked legs makes Colin Craven stand up for the first time in The Secret Garden?
Ben Weatherstaff
Ben Weatherstaff, glaring over the wall from a ladder, had believed the gossip that the boy was a cripple. Fury gets Colin up and onto his feet.
Q 20What does Mary Lennox think the dark, windy moor might be on her night carriage ride in The Secret Garden?
The sea
The sea is her guess because the wind makes a wild, low, rushing sound in the dark. She is told it is miles of land where only heather, gorse and broom grow.
Q 24What does Mary Lennox ask her uncle for when he offers her toys, books or dolls in The Secret Garden?
A bit of earth
A bit of earth is all she wants, so that she can plant seeds and watch them grow. Her uncle says she reminds him of someone else who loved growing things.
Q 25Which gift does Dickon's mother buy Mary Lennox for twopence from a passing pedlar in The Secret Garden?
A skipping rope
A skipping rope was something Mary had never seen before. Skipping along the paths gives her the strength and appetite she lacked in India.
Q 26Which condition does Colin Craven dread developing, as his father did, in The Secret Garden?
A hunched back
A hunched back is his great dread, and he keeps expecting to feel a lump. Mary checks his spine during a tantrum and tells him there is not one as big as a pin.
Q 27In The Secret Garden, Mary Lennox compares the bossy Colin Craven to which kind of Indian prince she once saw?
A rajah
A rajah she saw in India was a boy covered in rubies, emeralds and diamonds whom everyone had to obey in a minute. The narrator then keeps giving Colin the title.
Q 28What does Colin Craven keep hidden behind a silk curtain above his mantelpiece in The Secret Garden?
His mother's portrait
His mother's portrait stays covered because he dislikes her laughing face watching him when he is ill and miserable. Once he is well, he leaves the curtain open.
Q 29Which dialect word does Dickon use for a plant that is still alive in The Secret Garden?
Wick
Wick means alive or lively, and Dickon proves it by cutting into grey stems with his knife to show Mary the green inside.
Q 30In The Secret Garden, what is the Indian term for the nursemaid who raises Mary Lennox instead of her mother?
Ayah
Ayah is the word for the nurse paid to keep Mary out of her mother's sight. Waking to find a stranger at her bedside is Mary's first sign that something is wrong.