What is the significance of the gooseberry garden in Saki's story "The Lumber Room"?

The significance of the gooseberry garden in Saki's short story “The Lumber Room” is in what that garden represents. Nicholas, an apparently precocious child prone to some degree of mischievous behavior, is being raised by a distant relative, specifically, his cousins’ aunt who fancies herself Nicholas’s aunt as well. The story begins with one of Nicholas’s pranks—he places a frog from the garden in his bowl of milk and bread—leading to his aunt’s condemnation of...

The significance of the gooseberry garden in Saki's short story “The Lumber Room” is in what that garden represents. Nicholas, an apparently precocious child prone to some degree of mischievous behavior, is being raised by a distant relative, specifically, his cousins’ aunt who fancies herself Nicholas’s aunt as well. The story begins with one of Nicholas’s pranks—he places a frog from the garden in his bowl of milk and bread—leading to his aunt’s condemnation of his behavior. His penalty, Saki’s narrator states, will be his inability to accompany his cousins and his younger brother on a hastily arranged trip to the beach. The narrator explains how this form of punishment fits into the aunt’s pattern of conjuring playful outings and other treats to wield leverage over whichever child had sinned:

“It was her habit, whenever one of the children fell from grace, to improvise something of a festival nature from which the offender would be rigorously debarred; if all the children sinned collectively they were suddenly informed of a circus in a neighboring town, a circus of unrivalled merit and uncounted elephants, to which, but for their depravity, they would have been taken that very day.”

This is where the gooseberry garden becomes important. In addition to banning Nicholas from the trip to the beach, the aunt further forbids him from entering the garden. The significance of the garden, therefore, lies with its symbolism. The garden represents yet another tool with which to ostensibly gain leverage over one of the children. The irony in Saki’s story, however, is that Nicholas’s attention is drawn not to the gooseberry garden but to the locked lumber room, the inside of which has been a mystery to the young boy. As the aunt prowls the entrances to the garden, anticipating catching Nicholas attempting to defy her orders, the boy instead gains access to the lumber room and discovers its secrets.