pink mallows

The Secret Garden is a symbol of both the sacredness and the prohibition of love in Ukrainian folklore. Literally and symbolically: in the Ukrainian village at night, the garden was a place where strangers were unlikely to appear at night. A girl would arrange a meeting in the garden with her chosen one. This gesture would clearly suggest that risk is as big as her feelings; since her readiness for love would very much likely be followed by punishment in the faces of parents and societies’ madness and denial for the love outside the marriage. The Secret Garden is a place of pure self-abandonment and joy, yet it also represents a ruthless readiness for destiny - a safe haven for women to express their love despite the possibility of judgment and social exclusion. Thus, the Secret Garden remains a garden of paradoxes intertwined within a woman's experience in the process of cultivating love.