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January 11, 2010

Movie gardens: a critic's choice

Rear Window Introducing Chris Kaltenbach, who has for years reviewed movies for The Baltimore Sun. We asked him what the best looking movie gardens are, and here is what he says:

Gardens have, perhaps, been somewhat slighted by the movies.

There was the Garden of Eden in John Huston's 1967 The Bible -- which I'm sure was quite lavish and green. But to these 7-year-old eyes, unclad Ulla Bergryd as Eve was a lot more spectacular than anything rooted in the soil.

There also Vittorio de Sica's 1971 The Garden of the Finizi-Continis, but that was more about the dawn of fascism that botany.

And, of course, there's New York's Madison Square Garden, where much of the Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter (1970) and Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same (1976) were shot.

But for memorable movie gardens, nothing can beat Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 Rear Window.

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Posted by Susan Reimer at 3:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Gardens in the movies

"It's Complicated:" the garden

Enchanted April As Garden Variety has reported, the Meryl Streep romantic comedy It's Complicated has inspired lots of chatter among gardeners who found her character's garden too good to be true.

In fact, it is. Production designers told the Los Angeles Times that they grew the vegetables in greenhouses, dug up the best ones and planted them in the movie garden. Even the best tomatoes were chosen and then wired to the plants.

Then somebody jumped in to say that the garden in the blockbuster hit Avatar made Meryl's garden look like a weed patch.

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Posted by Susan Reimer at 2:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Gardens in the movies

January 8, 2010

The movie garden? "It's Complicated"

Photo credit: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Studios

Really complicated.

Gardeners have been buzzing in the blogosphere about Meryl Streep's garden in the hit holiday movie, "It's Complicated."

She plays Jane, who was trained a baker in France, and her garden is something right out of the Wizard of Oz: beyond perfect.

Deborah Netburn of the Los Angeles Times contacted Jon Hutman, the film's production designer, who gave up the trade secrets of the garden: Everything was grown in a greenhouse; only the best-looking plants were transplanted to the set; and the tomatoes were wired onto the plants. (A gardening maneuver I am still trying to picture.)

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Posted by Susan Reimer at 6:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Gardens in the movies