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10,000 cut roses and 7,000 potted plants: meet the man who grew the original Secret Garden

A hidden delight: the original Secret Garden was grown on the edge of Pinewood Studios - Warner Bros
A hidden delight: the original Secret Garden was grown on the edge of Pinewood Studios - Warner Bros

When the first trailer for the new Secret Garden film was released in March 2020, fans of the beloved 1993 version were shocked.

The children’s classic by Frances Hodgson Burnett – about a spoilt and unhappy little girl, Mary Lennox, who moves from India to live with her widowed uncle in his grand and gloomy Yorkshire mansion, hating every moment of it until she discovers a secret garden – has been adapted for the screen several times.

But it was Agnieszka Holland’s charming 1990s adaptation, beautifully shot by Roger Deakins, that stirred viewers' hearts: warm, delicate, earthen and sincere. Its walled English garden, the magnetic core of the film towards which everything gravitates and in which sickness is healed, enchanted adults and children alike with its moments of magic concealed within the ordinary.

This year’s remake, starring Colin Firth and made by the producers of Harry Potter, revealed a garden riddled with CGI, with flowers growing fantastically as children sprint through overhanging leaves and tropically bright petals to a blockbuster action movie soundtrack utterly opposed to the original’s haunting score. Viewers took to the YouTube comments in a huff.

“Have the producers not heard of the phrase ‘less is more’?” reads one. “The story is powerful enough without needing to add unnecessary magic,” reads another. A third: “Another day, another classic movie butchered.”

The contrast is particularly stark, considering that the original garden was built entirely from scratch, under the watchful eye of Stuart Craig, the three-time Oscar-winning set designer behind the Harry Potter films, The English Patient and Gandhi. For both Craig and director Holland, the garden had to be two things. First: a polar opposite to the dark, desolate Yorkshire moors on which loomed Misselthwaite Manor. Second: resistant to the lure of heightened reality.

“This is a story about something very real," Holland told the New York Times back in 1993. "Yorkshire is Yorkshire; the garden is a garden. You want something symbolic without becoming too theatrical."

The first thing Craig thought, for his part, was that the garden needed structure. “The thing about flowers,” the 78-year-old tells me quietly down the phone, “is that they can end up looking rather dull. It needed an architectural element.”

He and his team scouted across Yorkshire for the perfect secret garden, a garden in which in winter would see “leafless stems of climbing roses… so thick that they matted together” creating “tendrils of swinging curtains” and tangled trees forming a “hazy mantle” – and which, in summer, would have “bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles”.

In bloom: the 1993 version of Mary's garden
In bloom: the 1993 version of Mary's garden

No such garden existed, and the feat of changing seasons within just 10 weeks was impossible. Instead, Craig set about growing his own secret garden in the disused churchyard at the back of Pinewood Studios, fittingly forgotten and wild, structured with ancient cedar trees, a pond, and a mossy stone bust of an old woman. Being no gardener (“my neighbours were horrified when they heard I was making this garden”), Craig hired a greenery expert, Ron Whittle, to fill the garden and tend to it. “The rule of thumb at the time,” says Craig, “was that almost anything could be prepared in 12 weeks.”

In marched 17,200 pots of annuals and grasses, 1,200 perennials and 4,000 wild geraniums, as well as 10,000 cut roses and 7,000 potted plants. Ferns, foxgloves, aster, love-in-the-mist and larkspur joined too, at a total cost of $180,000 to the $18 million film. Each night, after the actors left the set and night fell, trampled roses were gathered up and replaced for the morning.

As for the robin redbreast, with his “red waistcoat-like satin” and tiny puffed breast, as much the protagonist as Mistress Mary herself, Craig was judicious. “I learned that there's a big difference between the European robin and the American robin. The American one is decidedly less attractive. It’s much bigger and somehow less precious,” he says.

Craig booked a European robin for the job and hired a photographer to film it. “He sat patiently on set with the robin and the other animals (including lambs and a rabbit), which were all real. I looked at our robin yesterday, it’s a lovely robin.”

Stuart Craig in his design studio 
Stuart Craig in his design studio

Craig’s major anxiety on set related to a rather “neurotic” chestnut tree. “There was a big, sweet chestnut tree in the garden. It was covered in foliage, so when we shot the winter scenes after the summer scenes, we had to set about taking every single leaf off the tree. I was very stressed that the tree would not know which season it was meant to be in. It got very anxious. So the next year I went back to the garden to check on it and make sure it hadn’t died. Thankfully it had grown another set of leaves.”

Another nervous moment was when the three-year-old actress, who plays a young Mary Lennox with her mother in a flashback of the garden in bloom, was forced to cry on set. “What was very disconcerting, was that there is a shot of Mary in the garden, as a toddler, beneath these massive Gunnera leaves, huge, bigger than our three-year-old star.

“And they wanted her to cry, because she had lost her mother. And they shouted at Mary and made her cry, so they could get their shot. Lots of the crew were incredibly shocked. No harm was done however, the child wasn’t traumatised. But that certainly wouldn’t happen now.”

Restorative: The Secret Garden
Restorative: The Secret Garden

Times have changed indeed. Does Craig think the CGI in the new film is a welcome improvement? “It’s all very good,” he says kindly. “This is a very exciting time for cinema. My film would be too slow for the modern taste. Roger Deakins didn’t have any special effects he could use, so he had to backlight everything in the garden individually. He did it beautifully, layering light throughout the garden for added structure.”

Will Craig watch the film? “I’m too curious not to,” he chuckles. “You have to compare.”

On whether the classic needed to be remade, however, Craig isn’t as sure. “It’s studios playing safe out of nervousness. Why don’t they remake some of the worst films in cinema instead, and leave the good ones alone? But studios are just cautious, they want to stick with things that have worked before.”

The garden on the edge of Pinewood Studios remains, but not as Craig knows it. “The secret garden was a set, after all, so it was struck off like anything else. I never anticipated that anyone would care for it.”