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Gardening’s wild chıld
Mary Reynolds was the youngest person ever to win a Chelsea gold medal with her Irish wilderness garden – now her inspiring story has been made into a film
Designer Mary Reynolds thought she was doing the right thing when the night before her garden was due to be shown to the judges of 2002’s Chelsea Flower Show, she poured two bottles of bleach into her water feature to meet the competition’s health and safety rules.
Near catastrophe ensued. Thanks to the young Irish gardener’s over-enthusiasm – she was only supposed to pour in two capfuls – thousands of bubbles were created, leaving sediment not only in her garden but in those of neighbouring contestants too. ‘Back then people literally covered their exhibits in cotton wool till the last minute,’ Mary recalls. ‘At this point everything had been uncovered and suddenly my Irish garden was producing bleachflavoured bubbles. We were wiping down individual leaves for hours.’
It didn’t augur well. Mary’s creation – a Celtic sanctuary of stones, pasture and wild flowers featuring two truckloads of sod and stones from Wicklow sheep fields, not to mention wild rabbit droppings and bog-land weeds – already ran contrary to the more manicured offerings of the time. Yet it struck a chord with the public and judges alike, winning not only a gold medal but praise from Prince Charles, who also took part that year.
Aged just 28, Mary became the youngest-ever contestant to win gold at Chelsea, a victory that helped her become a world-famous landscape designer. Now her inspiring story’s been brought to life in a charming film, Dare To Be Wild, starring Emma Greenwell as Mary and Tom Hughes – currently playing Prince Albert in ITV drama Victoria – as her then boyfriend Christy Collard.
The youngest of six children, Mary was raised in County Wexford by her soil scientist father Shea and mother Teresa, a teacher, and recalls enjoying ‘huge freedom’ which instilled in her a love of nature and landscape. ‘They were very different times,’ says Mary, now 42 and mother to son Ferdia, 12, and daughter Ruby, ten. ‘You were thrown out in the morning and you didn’t go back till dinner time. There was this tiny little field where I could play for hours.’ It was in that field, she says, that she had a formative moment. ‘This makes me sound mad but one time I went in and it seemed the gap in the field closed behind me and there was no way out,’ she says. ‘ I was frightened but as I sat in the grass and relaxed I noticed the plants were all preening for my attention, that we were sharing the land. It changed the way I looked at nature.’ She studied landscape design at University College Dublin before setting up her own garden design business. ‘But I hated what I was doing. It felt like we were trying to impose ourselves on nature.’ It was against this backdrop that Mary applied to compete in the Chelsea Flower Show, submitting a design focused on the idea of a wild Celtic Sanctuary. Entered through a ‘moon gate’ stone archway, it included a circular pool surrounded by four stone Druid thrones with a fire burning at their centre, as well as Irish pasture and wild flowers. Her garden was a startling contrast to the other, highly stylised gardens in the show – yet even before it had been formally unveiled it had won the approval of Prince Charles, who dropped by for a chat. ‘We shared a lot of the same ideas so we chatted about the things he’s interested in, like organic farming,’ she says. ‘He said a lot of nice things about my work.’
The public clearly felt the same way, and queued for hours to see the garden. ‘Irish people said it was like a little slice of home, but a lot of people who weren’t Irish were crying, telling me they remembered places like that when they were young,’ says Mary. ‘They were grieving for a lost wilderness.’
Plenty of commissions followed, yet Mary says her vision has kept evolving. ‘I realised none of the gardens I was making wanted to stay as I designed them, which meant I was doing something wrong. So I stopped working and began writing a book.’
The result, The Garden Awakening, was a plea for us to change the way we look at the land around us. ‘People garden to connect with nature but often nature is actually lost through gardens – because they’re there to look pretty,’ she says.
‘We punish land for evolving. We tell it to get back in its box for when the neighbours come around. But our role should be as guardians, not gardeners. We need to be part of the land again.’ So now she’s returned to Wexford to set up a gardening school to help share her vision.
Watching her past brought to life has been ‘very weird’, Mary admits. ‘Parts of it are fictionalised but not much. After all, truth is stranger than fiction.’
‘I hated the feeling we were trying to impose ourselves on nature’