The elusive doorway into a secret garden But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognised apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city. It was a coming-of-age moment for this most poetic of architectural features. Low doors, easy to guard and control, are of course as ancient as city walls and, indeed, secret gardens. But henceforward their wonder and charm, of which everyone was probably already half-aware, was outed. Now, in our imaginations, they would also represent the way to those most inaccessible places, such as ideal childhoods or parallel, more exciting universes. Whether or not we discover such metaphorical low doors, we feel, determines nothing less than how much we get from life; whether we just skim helplessly over the years until the coffin lid closes, unaware of what life has to offer, or whether we successfully milk it for everything it's got. No wonder, then, that gardeners like low doors. Here is a feature positively groaning with symbolism, association and meaning. There have been other portals to secret gardens - the back door in Tom's Midnight Garden and the wardrobe to Narnia spring to mind - but none so beguiling, following Carroll and Waugh, as the low door. Its conception is so pleasing. Swagged and half-concealed by climbers running wild, its paint blistered and peeling, its lowness forcing the adult to stoop to enter, thereby becoming a child again: what buried longings wouldn't be stirred by its rusty latch and creaking hinges? Best of all, there's a prototype. The Low Door of low doors, the door that inspired Carroll and Waugh, actually exists. Dark green, piercing a high wall of Cotswold stone, it leads into the Dean's Garden of Christ Church, Oxford, the college where Carroll was a young mathematics fellow and Sebastian Flyte an undergraduate. Not that where a low door leads matters much: it's the notion that's so exciting. In the 20th century, the social changes wrought by two world wars helped condition us - assisted, obviously, by F. Hodgson Burnett - to the idea that secret gardens are places of wistful dereliction. But having alighted on a portal to paradise, who would quibble about what follows? Antony Woodward is the author of The Garden in the Clouds (£8.99, Harper Press)