Harry Potter and the Garden of Intrigue

Being an exploration of the differences in Mr. Potter's life pursuant to his understanding Victorian flower language at age 11. Single Point-of-Departure: Harry has a working lightbulb in his cupboard.

Harry Potter, all related characters, and the original Harry Potter narrative are properties of J. K. Rowling.

Chapter 1

The Giant

"Wake up, you useless boy!" Uncle Vernon's shout roused Harry from a rather pleasant dream about some kind of hairy wall, and the boy started scrambling for his trousers. He'd have perhaps five seconds before- BAM! Uncle Vernon started- BAM! Slamming his great meaty fist into- BAM!

"I'm up! I'm up!" called Harry, desperate for some relief from the noise. His reward was instantaneous silence from the beleaguered doorframe, only to be replaced by a more muffled rhythmic pounding as Dudley started stomping down the stairs. As mornings went, it was rather tame for young Mr. Harry Potter. After the incident on Dudley's birthday, he was glad of the respite.

Scarcely a minute later, Harry was setting the table for breakfast. He'd been doing pretty much every chore around the house since they'd let him out of the cupboard last week. At least they were feeding him again. Harry hadn't gotten many full meals in the past ten years, but the past few months had left his stomach aching with hunger almost constantly. He'd been looking forward to breakfast since turning out his light the previous night. Or was it early that morning? Apart from sunrise, which he was always awake for, Harry had never been very good at telling the time. He'd be reading a book on the history of Wales, or how to boil potatoes (actually quite a useful book, he'd been allowed to cook supper for a week after reading it), or the subtleties of Victorian flower language, and suddenly he'd realize that he had ten minutes to sunrise and he'd been awake the whole time. Sometimes Harry wished the light in his cupboard didn't work, so he wouldn't be short on sleep so often, but he knew that Uncle Vernon would have made sure nothing good came of extra sleep. Not to mention reading by the light of that electric bulb was pretty much his only respite (what a wonderful word, respite) from Dudley.

"Idiot boy! That's coming out of your clothing allotment," shouted Uncle Vernon, suddenly. Harry realized he'd dropped one of the plates, and of course it had shattered on the linoleum floor.

"I- I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking," stammered Harry, who didn't even have a clothing allotment to begin with- all his clothes were hand-me-way-downs from Dudley, and fit about as well as a fish in a tree-

"Too right you weren't. That's your problem, you ungrateful whelp, you just don't think!" With that, Vernon boxed Harry's ears and said something about breakfast.

He's probably telling me I don't get any breakfast, thought Harry. I wonder if he's realized that I can't hear him? From the increasingly ruddy shade of Uncle Vernon's face, he probably had. Harry decided this was a great time to start weeding the back garden. "I think I should go weed the back garden," said Harry. He quickly picked up the broken shards of the plate, dropped them in the wastebasket, said "goodbye" to Aunt Petunia, and dashed out the door with his bag in tow.

Weeding the garden wasn't nearly as torturous as the Dursleys seemed to think. Harry actually quite enjoyed seeing his own hands shaping and guiding the growth of so many living things. It gave him a sense of accomplishment that he'd never had in school, and could never find inside the tacky walls of Number 4 Privet Drive. After he'd been weeding for a few hours, Harry heard the unmistakable sound of Dudley and friends coming around the house, looking for another round of Dudley And His Friends Beat Up Harry Potter. Harry managed to avoid them for a few minutes by hiding inside the refuse cans, but soon regretted it; the oily banana peels and sundry other unpleasant leavings, slowly rotting in their own little world, put him quite off his lunch. I really hope Uncle Vernon's in a good mood by now, thought Harry. I don't want to miss all my meals today. Harry realized he was looking at a lump of soggy custard, an impossible task in the darkness, which meant that Dudley had found him out and taken the lid off the can.

Harry tried not to hurry back to the Dursleys' house, lingering at the petunias he'd been nurturing on the front walk. Pet