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Gilding the LilyWhat movies get wrong (and right) about gardening.

By Constance Casey
Posted Friday, Dec. 28, 2007, at 7:32 AM ET
Atonement. Click image to expand.

So there I was muttering, "Fraud, fraud," while watching Enchanted April.

It's a charming movie that sets very few viewers to grumbling. Oppressed women leave cold, rainy 1920s England and proceed to find happiness, peace, and sunshine in a rented castle on the Italian coast.

My complaint wasn't about the story line but about the fact that the movie's Portofino, Italy, hillside garden was bursting with flowers that wouldn't be blooming simultaneously. No garden in the real world would look like that—the blooms of high summer (roses, sunflowers, geraniums) right next to the flowers of April (daffodils, tulips, camellias). It's garden fraud.

Obviously, a movie company's greens wrangler trucked in numerous pots of flowers from a greenhouse, where they'd been forced to bloom out of season.

In our unfilmed real lives, at this low-light, bare-branch time of year, we look for comfort in flowery movies, and it's pleasant to come in from the sleet to see some roses. Does it matter that a lot of movie gardens are shamelessly overdone and ridiculously tarted up? We are used to accepting artifice in other realms. The photographers from House Beautiful and Architectural Digest arrive with a designer who adds better lampshades and prettier pillows to the décor. Porn and fashion magazines airbrush away the imperfections of women's bodies.

Those ideals might be meant to dazzle and inspire. But sometimes perfection leads to despair—damn, my house/complexion/garden will never look that good.

Thankfully, the film world has made progress on the garden-fraud front with the English movie of the moment, Atonement, which serves up a true-to-season summer garden, with a meaningful sense of incipient decadence. The foxgloves have partially gone to seed, the wisteria is over, and the roses on the arbor are drooping. One quibble is that the enormous place appears to have only one gardener, our hero, Cambridge-educated Robbie, seen pushing a wheelbarrow full of lavender (not proper summer work for such a learned fellow, even if he is the housekeeper's son).

Has there ever been an authentic movie message about the work of gardening, wheelbarrows and pruners, hopes and dreams? Something that communicates that it's difficult but satisfying, and that even if it doesn't achieve perfection, it's yours.

There is at least one movie that is actually about gardening—Greenfingers—but unfortunately it depicts the process in a misleading way. (Not to mention it's probably the dumbest movie Helen Mirren was ever in; and certainly the sappiest one Clive Owen ever made.) In Greenfingers, British prison inmates find gratification (and time outside a cell) through creating a garden. The idea comes in part from a project run by the Horticultural Society of New York and the corrections department at Rikers Island.

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Constance Casey, a former newspaper editor, was a New York City Department of Parks gardener for five years. E-mail gardening questions to .
Still of Keira Knightley in Atonement by Alex Bailey copyright © 2006 Universal Studios. All rights reserved.
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Comments from the Fray Editor:

The Fray was as charming and slightly weird as the article. It was nice to see readers made happy just by the fact that it had been written--see both items below—and we on the Fray team will certainly never get our King Charles Spaniels mixed up again.

We also loved the gardening tips for prisoners here – a fascinating disquisition on why cabbages are the best choice for a donation to the prison kitchen, why they can't grow hot peppers--and smoking may be bad, but at least the nicotine can get recycled. Our readers can explain how fountains work, and they picked roses and daffodils together, TODAY.

Comments from the Fray

So I guess I am going to Atonement after all (sigh). I did not think I could sit through another movie of Keira Knightley and her pubescent frame but to get a chance to see another English garden? How could I resist now? I have only been to Chelsea and Hampton Court in the prime of the growing season. I have long been tormented as a horticulturist and garden designer and stylist while sitting in a movie theatre watching the fake flowers, some so badly artificial to make me wince. I have often thought, how could I become a consultant or a Greensman in movies... even TV gardens are fake.

Thanks for the company in my misery : - /

--catsfleur

(to reply, click here)

I was charmed by the idea for this article because I have my own strange little movie problem. The author made me feel as though I'm not alone--which seems to be the great reassurance our age craves. I've never noticed the flowers in movies or given a moment's thought to roses and daffodils blooming together on screen but nowhere else in the world--no, with me it is the dogs. Directors are always using anachronistic breeds or simply the wrong breed. It doesn't take that much research to get it right. Take Zefirelli's Jane Eyre. For some unknowable reason he turned Rochester's famous dog, Pilot, into a Belgian Tervuren, a breed not established until the quite recently (although the type might have been around in Jane's time). Why not go with something that fit the description in the book? "I beheld a great black and white long-haired dog, like the Gytrash in the lane." Hmm--sounds to me like a Newf of the black and white variety or perhaps some charming mutt.

Directors also like to be confused about on the King Charles/Cavalier King Charles issue. [long explanation omitted for space reasons. Read in full here] Any glance at the art of the time should tell a props director that.

See, like Casey, I have my own little -- I think they are called bugaboos. But now I know I am not alone...

--Lady Jane

(To reply, click here)

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