Gardens on film: how the magic happens behind the scenes

“As long as you have a garden you have a future and as long as you have a future you are alive,” wrote Frances Hodgson Burnett in The Secret Garden, published in 1911. Rarely has there been a year when the healing powers of horticulture’s precious natural “medicine” have been so needed and experienced by millions as this one past.

Part of the enduring appeal of Hodgson Burnett’s classic children’s tale – the story of Mary and Colin, two unhappy (and frankly rather poisonous) children, finding redemption in restoring an overgrown but once beautiful space – is that everyone has their own “secret garden” in their head; a compendium of memories of places they have come across, either in childhood or later life. They might not even have read the book itself, but that shimmering vision is firmly lodged in our national psyche.

Updated to the 1940s, with a flash or two of magic realism thrown in to represent the symbiotic relationship between the garden and the children as they become less poisonous under its influence, the latest film version has recently been released, having been delayed by Covid-19.

It features not one but eight locations around the country to create the secret garden, sewn together like a colourful patchwork to evoke Burnett’s fictional idyll, found through an old door in a high wall.

Forgoing computer-generated trickery as far as possible, each was subtly enhanced with extra plants and tweaks by the “greens team”, led by Lucinda McLean of Filmscapes, a family firm of landscape designers specialising in film sets. Filmscapes was established by McLean’s father, Ron Whittle, who worked on the previous version of The Secret Garden back in 1993.

With canyons and rock pools (Puzzlewood, Gloucestershire; Bodnant, Conwy), forests of tree ferns (Trebah, Cornwall), long double borders (Helmsley Walled Garden, North Yorks), a laburnum arch (Bodnant again), ruined arches (Fountains Abbey, North Yorks) and a rose-draped Italianate terrace (Iford Manor, near Bath), it would seem to be a walled garden covering many more acres than in any actuality, but, says Rosie Alison, one of the film’s producers closely involved with the locations, “We wanted the garden to appear boundless, so when you are in it, you can’t quite see the edges; I think it is like that when you are a child. Places do seem to go on and on.”

While filming a world as if through child’s eyes meant that the gardens didn’t have to be as accurate to real life as in a more literal film – where the sight of a shrub flowering out of season, or a tree not introduced to the country for another century, gives horticultural nitpickers (such as me) the vapours – the team wanted to use as many actual gardens and plants as possible, rather than resorting to studio sets and fake flowers.

“To be honest, it wasn’t budgetarily sensible to go on the odyssey that we did, but we felt committed to celebrating nature. We shot in as many real places as possible; it could not have been lovelier to work on,” says Alison.

They even created a pretty convincing India at Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens in Dorset, using the existing tea room with just a few tweaks on the shutters and other details to create Mary’s parental home. Alison went to prep school at Duncombe Park in North Yorkshire, the wide lawns and woodlands of which are the “negative” spaces in which Mary plays before she finds the gate – elegant, historic and classy to us, but boooooring for a solitary child.

The nearby Helmsley Walled Garden was also used, and is something of a “secret garden” itself, having once supplied the Feversham family at Duncombe Park with flowers, fruit and veg before falling into disuse. It was rescued in the 1990s and, appropriately, has become a centre for horticultural therapy and is now rather fabulous.

This can be witnessed in a charming scene where Mary and Dickon, the wild local lad she befriends, run happily between the wide double herbaceous borders, which spring to life as they pass. To achieve this, the team sent the children down the path in one shot; meanwhile going back to film the borders throughout the season and carefully melding all together.

Another bit of seasonal splicing was required for the scene in which the children bring Colin’s father, played by Colin Firth, through the gate and straight into a tunnel of yellow laburnum, which many readers would recognise as the one at Bodnant. Getting the actors under the arch when it was in full flower was an impossibility of schedule, so they were filmed gazing up in wonderment, and the flowers, which had been filmed at their peak beforehand, were added in later.

Although the large part of the arch is the actual Bodnant one, there is a little further cheating by Filmscapes, which built the gate and entrance to the laburnum tunnel in London, covering it with fake white wisteria flowers – more readily available than laburnum and similar enough for the purpose – painted the exact egg yolk yellow of the real thing.

There are some incongruences to keep those nitpickers happy though, such as the forest of damp-loving gunnera that leads into a not entirely convincing dingley dell, where the characters’ mothers play with their babies in a dreamlike sequence. But at least the turf of the dell was studded with real wildflowers and the gunnera real too, carted around the various locations to provide a link between them.

This was something of a challenge when they were filming in 2018, one of the hottest summers on record. “We discovered gunnera doesn’t really like to travel,” says McLean.

In various scenes, the team had to add in plants to look overgrown and tangled (the company keeps plenty of pots of “weeds” for such moments), which would then be taken away bit by bit to signify the children had been working on it and tidying up. At Iford Manor, where one of the climatic scenes was filmed, Alison and the director, Marc Munden, wanted the sense of a garden that was in very full, wild bloom, so McLean and co brought in truckloads of brightly coloured herbaceous plants to film on one of the upper Italianate terraces.

“Iford is beautiful, but it is mauve and white,” says McLean. “It was a bit too grown up and I wanted it to be more fun.”

Marianne Cartwright-Hignett, the owner of Iford, watched with admiration. “It was an extraordinary effect; they transformed the place, even putting turf on top of the colonnades. Everything was extremely carefully done to protect the sculptures and it was absolutely magical.

The greens team did a wonderful job; it was at the peak of the heatwave at the start of July 2018 and they were up at 6am every day having to water the 1,500 or so plants they brought in, plus our own plants in the flower beds.”

There was one huge gamble the production crew took when filming: you can plump up foliage, add in a hedge to hide an unsightly views, or even use puppeteers to shake individual blades of grass with invisible fishing wires as the characters pass (yes, that’s what they did) – but making children bathe in a rock pool in a torrent of rain, or film them sitting chatting merrily next to a herbaceous border flattened by wind, would not have had the same uplifting effect.

“There was so much risk,” admits Alison. “To be honest, it was quite stressful in advance. You only have one chance on these budgets and you can’t afford to wait for the weather. But, in five weeks of outdoor shooting, we only had three hours of rain.

“When Colin Firth was reuniting with his son [at Iford], I was sitting there weeping because it was such a beautiful day. The flowers looked fantastic and the sun was shining. It would have been very hard to make that work if the weather was bad.” The magic of nature played its own part beautifully.

My favourite gardens on film and TV

Sarah Raven

I love the scene in Orlando (1992), starring Tilda Swinton, where she walks between vast yews in a maze, first in 18th-century satins, then running away in the mist in a huge, billowing Victorian, green-black crinoline, almost as if she’s wearing a hot-air balloon, across the rough grass from the maze, out into the field where she falls and whispers fiercely into the turf, “Nature, nature, I am your bride, take me.…”

Mark Diacono

Chris Achilleos’s allotment was featured in an August episode of Gardeners’ World, and it really captured this most incredible plot. Set in the middle of noisy Tottenham, Chris marries edibles and ornamental in a way I’ve not seen bettered and grows the best figs I’ve ever eaten, and more besides.

Mary Keen

Almost half a century ago, Candida Lycett Green made The Front Garden. It was a quirky take on how and why people garden and the kind of thoughtful, questioning programme that rarely gets made now. Today’s presenters can be patronising, or so enthusiastic and celebified that they never seem normal. Dan Pearson’s A Year at Home Farm in the 1990s had a similar appeal and Sarah Raven is refreshingly low key and wears her learning lightly.

Jean Vernon

Probably the most pivotal BBC children’s television programme for me was the The Adventures of Parsley back in the 1970s. It was set in a magical herb garden and that alone was a magnetic attraction. I was enthralled by the creatures, all named after herbs; the dizzy and rather manic dancing Dill the dog, Sage the grumpy, wise old owl, Bayleaf, the doddering old gardener, and the weeping Mrs Onion and her baby chives.

I must have seen the repeats of the former series, The Herbs, too, as I was fascinated by Belladonna the witch, who turned several of the herbs into weeds and was eventually repelled by Dill. I still have a video of 10 episodes of The Adventures of Parsley, which my nieces and nephews were subjected to on every visit to their barmy aunt in the country. It had the added attraction of a real-life herb garden, where maybe, just maybe, the herbs might be hiding. But to be honest, I think I enjoyed watching it more than they did.

Ken Thompson

There are few feature films about gardening, fewer still about allotments, and hardly any that are also worth watching. Which is all the more reason to make sure you catch Grow Your Own, a (mostly) heartwarming comedy set on a Merseyside allotment. Reviewers were divided, some criticising its “twee optimism”, but personally I found it delightful and think you would have to be pretty miserable to dislike it.

The film was made in 2007 and its fine cast includes several actors who are rather more well-known now than they were at the time, including Eddie Marsan, Olivia Colman and Joanna Scanlan. If you liked Gregory’s Girl, or anything by Bill Forsyth, you’ll love Grow Your Own. And it also has some pretty good advice about growing potatoes.