Her affection for everything she could love increased.

Mistress Mary Quite Contrary

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.

She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.

Everything is made out of Magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden-in all the places.

However many years she lived, Mary always felt that 'she should never forget that first morning when her garden began to grow'.

Nothing in the world is quite as adorably lovely as a robin when he shows off and they are nearly always doing it.