The Golden Age of Children's Literature began with a garden party thrown by the Queen of Hearts in Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and its end was initiated with Peter's banishment from Mr. McGregor's vegetable patch in Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902). From the 1860s to the 1910s, almost every author of British children's literature set his or her text in "a world apart," usually a pastoral setting, in which children (or childlike animals) developed away from the distractions and perceived dangers of the industrial world. As historian Hugh Cunningham notes, “the more adults and adult society seemed bleak, urbanized, and alienated, the more childhood came to be seen as properly a garden, enclosing within the safety of its walls a way of life which was in touch with nature” (43).
Among the scholarly texts that focus on the garden motif in British children's literature, Jackie Wullschlager's Inventing Wonderland stands out for its careful analysis of the economic and social factors that encouraged such authors as Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, and J.M. Barrie to place their child protagonists within the natural world. Karen Patricia Smith's The Fabulous Realm: A Literary-Historical Approach to British Fantasy, 1780-1990 is also a valuable resource.
As far as primary texts are concerned, once you've read Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, you might want to read J.M. Barrie's 1904 play Peter Pan or 1911 novel Peter and Wendy, featuring the hero who wishes to remain a boy forever in the imaginary world of Neverland. A fine follow-up would be Robert Louis Stevenson's collection, A Child's Garden of Verses(1885), which includes many pastoral poems. Frances Hodgson Burnett's aptly titled The Secret Garden (1911) invests a garden with magical properties which restore the physical and spiritual health of two young children. And then, of course, there is A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh series, written during the 1920s, but designed to evoke in post-war readers a nostalgia for their own Victorian and Edwardian childhoods.
No survey of the Golden Age Gardens would be complete, however, without Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908), a text that celebrates the supposed kinship between children and Nature. In the following segment, Mole and Rat are spellbound by the beauty of the dawn:
"On either side of them, as they glided onwards, the rich meadow-grass seemed that morning of a freshness and a greenness unsurpassable. Never had they noticed the roses so vivid, the willow-herb so riotous, the meadow-sweet so odorous and pervading. Then the murmur of the approaching weir began to hold the air, and they felt a consciousness that they were nearing the end, whatever it might be, that surely awaited their expedition.
A wide half-circle of foam and glinting lights and shining shoulders of green water, the great weir closed the backwater from bank to bank, troubled all the quiet surface with twirling eddies and floating foam-streaks, and deadened all other sounds with its solemn and soothing rumble. In midmost of the stream, embraced in the weir's shimmering arm-spread, a small island lay anchored, fringed close with willow and silver birch and alder. Reserved, shy, but full of significance, it hid whatever it might hold behind a veil, keeping it till the hour should come, and, with the hour, those who were called and chosen" (207-208).
Smith, Karen Patricia. The Fabulous Realm: A Literary-Historical Approach to British Fantasy, 1780-1990. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1993.
Wullschlager, Jackie. Inventing Wonderland: The Lives and Fantasies of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J.M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, and A.A. Milne. New York: The Free Press, 1995.