ther as they had another venue nearby which they turned into a
temporary café. The restaurant was clad in yellow-plastered walls,
40 tons of red sand was laid on the patio, in the middle a dormant
fountain was built and throughout the whole area, hundreds of feet
of electrical cable run out.
In the end, The Secret Garden consisted of eight garden elements
and two were to be found in the most enchanting gardens in England
at Iford Manor in the Wiltshire countryside. This garden's special
elements were an Italianate colonnade and a Japanese garden. The
estate was owned by Harold Peto, a leading Victorian landscape and
garden designer. Iford Manor was his home and also his exhibition
garden for prospective clients. Using stone structures and ancient
objects collected from his travels through Europe, he built garden
rooms linked by a 100-ft-long colonnade. In its own right, the garden
is a horticulturist's dream with colour and texture throughout the
seasons but the designer wanted to bring more to it with the wide
walkway down the colonnade temporarily planted up by us leaving
a narrow path between blooms. The garden had its own logistical
challenges, situated down narrow country lanes, with the whole site
on a steep slope very tight for space. Our shoot was big and the only
way to manage it was to have various technical bases at the top and
bottom of the hill, offload into 4x4s to a tech dump, then hand-carry
everything inside. Three large spider-access machines where inched
carefully into position on special protection materials.
The only major issue was the garden was open regularly to the
public and certain parties had already booked in and an annual op-
era festival which only left us a two-week period to get in, shoot
for three days and wrap out! The family knew and loved the book,
as a family of eminent gardeners, here was a case in point that the
subject material opened doors to us which would have been closed
to many a production.
In our secret garden, plants will grow before our eyes (okay, this
is one of the CGI tricks we used). Trebah in Cornwall has one of the
largest gunnera plantations in the UK. A native plant of Brazil, they
A scene from the film with Dixie Egerickx. Photo ©2020 Studiocanal S.A.S.
