This sappy, in every sense, based-on-a-true story drama tells the story of how Irish landscape designer Mary Reynolds (played by Emma Greenwell) came to compete at the 2002 Chelsea flower show. Reynolds’ entry was a Celtic-themed space made with mature hawthorn trees, weathered stone, wildflowers and lots of waffle about the sanctity of untamed nature. The underlying eco-message is laudable, and the filmmakers deserve respect for getting a movie about garden design financed at all, but they do lay the sentiment on thick with a bulldozer, smothering the good bits with a dense compost of mawkishness and cliche. Consequently, Reynolds comes across here not just as an iconoclastic outsider but as a hippie sprite with Timotei-advert hair who must go to battle with the punctilious tweed-suited upper-class twits who control the Chelsea floor show. Meanwhile, her romantic entanglement with garden builder and part-time fiddle-player Christy Collard (Tom Hughes) becomes an Out of Africa-style love across continents. At least the gardens are, as you would expect, spectacularly beautiful.
