 Young Mary Lennox is orphaned by an earthquake in India and sent to England to live with her uncle in a cold ancestral manor in Yorkshire. Mary briefly meets him, still mourning for the wife who died ten years ago, but she is mostly left on her own. A resourceful and inquisitive girl, she soon makes two exciting discoveries. First she finds an overgrown secret garden, the favourite of her aunt and locked up since her death. Second, that she has a cousin, Colin, a sickly lad who has been told he must remain in bed out of the daylight at all times. Once Mary and another new friend, local lad Dickon, have brought the garden back to life they decide Colin must see it, a decision that will change several lives.