In the following passage from Beyond Green Gables: Kevin Sullivan’s Designscapes, the director “paints” a picture of a country garden that has been cultivated to appear wild and unarranged.

“An old English perennial garden design is meant to appear rambling and eclectic…Finding color harmony can be as much a trial as figuring out whether certain plants will grow well together. The overall effect is a riot of color along an alleyway of flagstones, culminating at its end in an architectural folly of ivy-covered columns and an ancient, gothic baptismal font. Lavender, periwinkle and coral-bells provide borders and ground cover to abundant perennial beds brimming with foxgloves, delphinium, tiger lilies, yarrow, orange calendula, purple coneflower and some annuals such as the luminous hibiscus and geraniums.”

The term wild English garden is an oxymoron. The contradictory aspects of such a place may be used well to represent the conflict between control and anarchy. In another scenario, such an English garden would make the perfect backdrop for film scenes where civilized characters are required to revert to a more primitive state of being.

There is a suitably torrid description of a garden in Chapter 8 of The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim, where the description of the luxuriant Mediterranean flora parallels the blossoming of the English women’s sensuality. For contrast, the author includes two species of “stand-offish” English flowers that are growing amidst the profusion of more exotic blooms. (The film version of the novel was shot in the fertile Italian locations of Portofino, Genoa and Liguria.)

“The wistaria was tumbling over itself in its excess of life, its prodigality of flowering; and where the pergola ended the sun blazed on scarlet geraniums, bushes of them, and nasturtiums in great heaps, and marigolds so brilliant that they seemed to be burning, and red and pink snapdragons, all outdoing each other in bright, fierce colour… The cherry-trees and peach-trees were in blossom–lovely showers of white and deep rose-colour among the trembling delicacy of the olives; the fig-leaves were just big enough to smell of figs, the vine-buds were only beginning to show… Colour seemed flung down anyhow, anywhere; every sort of colour, piled up in heaps, pouring along in rivers–the periwinkles looked exactly as if they were being poured down each side of the steps–and flowers that grow only in borders in England, proud flowers keeping themselves to themselves over there, such as the great blue irises and the lavender, were being jostled by small, shining common things like dandelions and daisies and the white bells of the wild onion, and only seemed the better and the more exuberant for it.”
 
If the cultivated garden represents a place where man and nature meet and make peace, it follows that a wild and overgrown garden might represent the darker and uncivilized nature of man.

When you think of un-tended gardens in literature and film, a variety of images come to mind like; the forest of thorns in The Sleeping Beauty or the abandoned and sad hideaway in The Secret Garden. I distinctly remember a haunting but creepy scene in Jack Layton’s The Innocents, where the figure of a sad female spectre appears beside a garden pond that has long rushes growing from it and willow boughs hanging over it. The effect is eerie and mournful especially with the black and white cinematography.

The image of a garden in a state of disarray or neglect can emphasize the negative predicaments of the characters in a story. A foreboding tangle of thorn trees is intended to imprison a princess and frighten would-be suitors. In some farfetched scenarios, plants even turn on human beings as in Wyndom’s novel and—film version of—: The Day of the Triffids or more recently, the musical film: Little Shop of Horrors. Another interesting film that uses a gothic/fairy tale garden is Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, where the freakish title character creates a fantastical topiary garden in the middle of a stylized American suburbia.

Two Interesting World Gardens worth investigating:

• Lotusland (Ganna Walska)
• Dewstow Gardens and Grottoes South Wales