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

By Constance CaseyPosted Friday, Dec. 28, 2007, at 7:32 AM ET

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As in Enchanted April, flowers from spring and summer zoom up together in the prisoners' garden. Everything in that garden is a success right off the bat. This is counter to the lesson a real-life gardener quickly learns: When one thing is fading, another is coming into its own; when one thing is failing, another is succeeding or at least surviving. Granted, this process is hard to show in a movie.

"The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there," says the aged murderer with a heart of gold in Greenfingers. He's stealing a line from George Bernard Shaw, as well as ringing a change on that syrupy, mistaken poem—"One is nearer God's heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth." (What is this wife killer doing, by the way, in a minimum-security prison?)

In another piece of horticulture cinema, 1993's The Secret Garden, the perfect spring is easier to take because the director, like the book's author, intended the garden as metaphor. Orphaned Mary Lennox unlocks a long-sealed gate and, with the help of magical Yorkshire lad Dickon, brings the walled garden of her dead aunt back to life. At the beginning of Mary's work, there's a late-winter moment that rings completely true—pushing back a tangle of dead weeds, she uncovers a thin green lily shoot.

In one of the DVD's extra features, the producer says frankly that for the garden they were "after something unusual and not of this world." There are swags of white roses no gardener could ever produce. Neither Mary nor Dickon is ever shown with a garden tool in hand. No shovel, no trowel. But the truly not-of-this-world feature is that Dickon comes into the garden with his tame deer and his pet goat! Given 20 minutes, those creatures would consume every rose and take the lilies down to nubs.

In a nod to reality, we learn that Ben, the gardener who'd been forbidden to enter the garden for the 10 years since the death of the lady of the manor, has been defying the lord's orders and working in secret. Thus the children's magic is built on the experienced gardener's basic maintenance work.

When a movie director goes for over-the-top gorgeousness, he or she may have made an obvious Garden of Eden statement but has missed a chance to use a garden to make a point about character and status. In his version of Pride and Prejudice (2005), Joe Wright, also the director of Atonement, uses a front garden to underscore the disorganization of the Bennet family, especially Mrs. Bennet, who ought to be keeping the household in line, inside and out. There's a little bit of green, but the main impression is of sheets drying overhead, mud, and chickens underfoot.

Our heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, travels from this disorder to Pemberley, the estate owned by Lord Darcy, the man she has rejected. (She's been told he's away, that she won't bump into him.) The movie viewer gasps in admiration when sharing Elizabeth's view out to the garden. We are stunned by the perfect lawn, the spouting fountain (what power is running the fountain back then, peasants on a treadmill?), and the finely sculpted hedges. If Darcy takes this good care of his hedges, she must be thinking, he could take really good care of me. The central message in this novel of women's economic insecurity is that the man who owns this house and this garden is immensely rich.

If you own or work a plot of land, you are, like it or not, the director of a garden scene. Your garden reveals something of your income, your state of mind, your character, your taste. Even if that state of mind is "I don't care much," or "I care sporadically" (very common), or "I'm someone who hires a landscape service."

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Constance Casey is a former newspaper editor and New York City Department of Parks gardener. Her blog is the Observant Gardener.

COMMENTS

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

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