Movies With Gardens or Gardeners in the Spotlight

Sometimes the setting in a tv show or movie is such a prominent part of the story that it almost becomes another character. Examples include coastal Cornwall in the BBC series Poldark and the Rocky Mountains in Robin Wright’s movie Land. Sometimes even a garden functions in this kind of way, becoming an integral piece of the story.

So, let’s look at some films that feature a garden or gardening. These films don’t have major plot twists or surprise endings. In fact, they may be pretty predictable. But if you can forgive them that, you might enjoy these wholesome movies that all recognize and celebrate the importance of growing.

Prefer to unwind with a book? Check out our Gardening Book Reviews.

All three movies I’ll discuss are British; I think it’s a testament to Britain’s long-established gardening tradition. As Helen Mirren’s character says in Greenfingers, presumably quoting Queen Elizabeth, “Gardening has been a national obsession for centuries. There cannot be any other occupation that absorbs equally every section of society.” That absorption, and the healthy obsession that fuels it, are on full display in these flicks. I found all three on Amazon Prime Video.

Greenfingers

Have you ever seen a Helen Mirren performance that wasn’t a solid 10? In Greenfingers (2001), she plays garden author and horticultural celebrity Georgina Woodhouse. The colorful Woodhouse appears throughout the movie in floral print dresses and showy hats, some of them covered in flowers. When she’s digging in the dirt, her outfit is more muted, but even then she doesn’t forget to wear pearls!

Most of the action takes place at the fictional Her Majesty’s Prison Edgefield, an experimental, minimum-security prison without any physical boundaries to keep prisoners in. The warden introduces a horticultural program at the facility, and an inmate named Collin (Clive Owen), who up until then has been sullen and withdrawn, really takes to both gardening and garden design. He heads a group of gardening inmates in securing the opportunity to participate in the Royal Horticultural Society’s Hampton Court Palace Flower Show, a major gardening event in the UK.

The characters are vivid, the story unfolds without any fat and includes wonderful details, like a love interest for Collin, named Primrose. Inspired by actual events, the movie portrays the enthusiasm that gardeners feel for their craft, and the magic of discovering flowers growing from forgotten seeds for the first time.

Dare To Be Wild

This 2015 film is based on events in the life of Irish garden designer and nature advocate Mary Reynolds, focusing the unusual garden design that won her a gold medal at the 2002 Chelsea Flower Show, another major annual UK horticultural event. Reynolds set some records with that 2002 win. At 28, she was the youngest winner ever. She was also only the third Irish person to construct a garden at Chelsea—even though the show had been happening for 89 years before her triumph.

Reynolds’s winning design was called Celtic Sanctuary. It married elements of Celtic mythology and the wild Irish landscape in which she grew up. The unconventional design, enclosed by a traditionally constructed drystone wall, included everyday weeds, a fairy mound and rabbit droppings. Native Irish plants—more than 500 of them—were used extensively, including mature hawthorns from west Cork. At the garden’s center, an inner circle featured four huge stone thrones and a central stone fire bowl.

I loved the hand-drawn garden designs shown in the movie. The drama, including a foray into Ethiopia and a love story between Reynolds and builder/environmentalist Christy Collard, plays out against lush scenery. Collard helped construct Celtic Sanctuary for the Chelsea Flower Show, and he built the rendition that appears in the movie.

One of Reynolds’s aims with Celtic Sanctuary was to represent wild nature, which her current advocacy work emphasizes. I think this film does a good job of suggesting how gardeners might invite more wildness into the spaces they love and curate.

Saving Grace

Set in a small village in Cornwall, Saving Grace (2000) centers less on gardening or a particular garden than the two films described above. But the unfolding of the plot rests firmly on the plant knowledge of the main protagonist, Grace Trevethyn, played by Brenda Blethyn.

Grace is widowed when her husband commits suicide. She learns soon after that he has left her completely bankrupt. Collectors and other various financial vultures descend, and Grace is threatened with penniless homelessness. Her gardener, Matthew—played by comedian Craig Ferguson, who coauthored the screenplay—asks her, when her power mower is repossessed, “Can you get a job?”

“What could I do?” says Grace, who has clearly lived quite sheltered from many matters financial and practical.

But it turns out she does have a fiscally viable skillset. She and Matthew cook up a plan to grow $300,000 worth of marijuana in her greenhouse. Grace figures that, growing hydroponically and propagating frequently, they should be able to harvest a sizable bud crop in about a month, just in time to save her house from foreclosure. Antics ensue.

This movie does a good job of representing the kind of fluency experienced gardeners have when they’ve been growing, breeding, pruning, propagating and loving plants for decades. It is a fun British comedy, somewhat in the style of 1983’s Local Hero. The village includes lovable, quirky characters, and everyone—including the audience—is rooting for Grace. The film generously includes beautiful long shots of the coastline and countryside. I wonder if you will drool, like I did, over Grace’s ginormous greenhouse?