Summary
Every afternoon on their way home from school the children play in the Giant's garden, a large, lovely place of soft grass, star-like flowers and twelve peach-trees, where the birds sing so sweetly that the children stop their games to listen. One day the Giant returns from a seven-year visit to his friend the Cornish ogre. Finding the children there, he shouts at them, declares that his own garden is his own garden, and builds a high wall round it with a noticeboard: Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. The children have to play on the dusty road, and they wander round the wall remembering how happy they were.
When Spring comes, it forgets the Giant's garden. The birds will not sing where there are no children, the trees forget to blossom, and a flower that peeps out sees the noticeboard and goes back to sleep. Snow and Frost move in for the whole year and invite the North Wind, who roars about the garden and blows down the chimney-pots, and the Hail, who breaks the slates on the castle roof. Autumn gives the garden no fruit because the Giant is too selfish, and he sits at his window, puzzled that Spring is so late.
One morning he hears a linnet and smells a delicious perfume. The children have crept in through a hole in the wall and are sitting in the trees, which have covered themselves in blossom. Only in the farthest corner is it still winter, where a little boy is too small to reach the branches and is crying. The Giant's heart melts. When he goes out, the other children run away, but the little boy, blinded by tears, does not see him coming. The Giant lifts him into the tree, which blossoms at once, and the boy flings his arms round his neck and kisses him. The children come back, Spring with them, and the Giant knocks down the wall with an axe. That evening the little boy has gone, and none of the children knows who he is.
For years the Giant plays with the children every afternoon, but he longs for his first little friend. Grown old and feeble, he watches from an armchair and says the children are the most beautiful flowers of all. One winter morning he sees in the far corner a tree covered in white blossoms, with golden branches and silver fruit, and beneath it the little boy. Running out, he finds the prints of two nails in the child's hands and feet and angrily asks who has dared to wound him. The child answers that these are the wounds of Love, and that because the Giant once let him play in his garden, he shall come today to the child's garden, which is Paradise. That afternoon the children find the Giant lying dead under the tree, covered with white blossoms.