Kinbote’s gardener in New Wye is a former male nurse who was looking to get into horticulture when Charles offered to give him a job and support him financially. Kinbote implies that he is sexually interested in the gardener and that he took the young man in to alleviate his own desperate loneliness. After having something of a premonition, the gardener appears conspicuously in the moment before Shade’s death. This echoes a moment from Shade’s childhood, in which he had a seizure (his first experience of death) while playing with a tin toy of a gardener pushing a wheelbarrow; in both cases, a gardener with a wheelbarrow appeared immediately before an experience of death. These kinds of resonances are proof to Shade of the universe being orderly and designed. After Shade’s death, the gardener falsely tells Sybil that Charles jumped in front of the bullet trying to save John’s life, and she is so impressed with Charles’s heroism that she agrees to give Charles the legal rights to “Pale Fire.”