Mary Reynolds
My Chelsea garden made people cry
There is a delicious moment in the sumptuous new film,
Dare to be Wild, about the historic 2002 Chelsea Flower Show win by rookie Irish gardener Mary Reynolds, when Prince Charles wanders into her garden by mistake, thinking it is his own.
He admires the natural planting, the rocks, the authenticity of the venerable hawthorn trees in bloom – before being gently shepherded off to his own Healing Garden entry, next door.
Reynolds, at 27 the youngest ever gold medal winner, goes on to claim the trophy for her hugely innovative, haunting Celtic Sanctuary, featuring a sheep field, 500 wild plant species, 200-year-old hawthorns and tons of ancient stone wall from Cork. In doing so, the diffident yet determined Reynolds beats both world-class garden designers and the heir to the British throne.
The scene in the biopic makes for an amusing if fictitious vignette. Wasn’t it slightly mischievous to include it?
“Oh, it’s pure fact,” contradicts Reynolds with a broad smile. “He came in the next day, too, after I’d beaten him. I said, ‘How’re you doing there, Charles, my man?’ and asked if he would like to sit down.
“He hesitated a bit, but I said, ‘Sure, you may as well have a go on one of my stone thrones because it doesn’t look like you’ll be getting one of you own any time soon.”
Given the Prince of Wales’ reputation as – how to put it delicately? – an occasionally “oversensitive”
individual, it’s testament to Reynolds’ charm (and the blithely stubborn informality of the Irish) that instead of taking offence, he laughed and obligingly did as she suggested.
They talked, about his writing (she’s a particular fan of Harmony: A New Way
of Looking at our World); about nature and the potential of life-affirming gardens that extend far beyond suburbia’s regimented herbaceous borders and serried box hedges.
“Chelsea was fabulous – a showcase for my vision that showed the world the value of wild places, but it was just the seed,” says Reynolds, now a vivacious, 42-year-old mother of two.
It sounds like modesty but is in truth absolute honesty. “I am still on my journey to find a way of working with nature in complete partnership, but that’s in the future.”
Before we look to the future we must revisit Reynolds’ extraordinary past. It’s all there in Dare to Be Wild,a beautifully shot, lyrical film in which she’s played by Emma Greenwell, best known for the improbably named
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The part of her love interest, handsome, idiosyncratic English eco-botanist, Christy Collard, is taken by Tom Hughes, who is currently smouldering as Prince Albert, in ITV’s Victoria.
“I love the film,” says Reynolds. “There’s some dramatic licence but the essentials are there. There is complete truth at its core.”
As the youngest of five children growing up on a farm in Wexford, Reynolds spent much of her time outdoors. Aged five, she experienced an epiphany in which she heard the plants whispering to her, each in their own distinctive voice, “craving” her attention, asking to be nurtured.
From there she started dreaming of and drawing designs for gardens based on nature; organic curves and planting sequences that complemented and mimicked the Fibonacci series, the mathematically precise spiral in which leaves grow on a stem to ensure each gets light.
Naive and unworldly – she’d never even travelled beyond her home shores – Reynolds applied to build a show garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, despite not having a penny of the £150,000 worth of sponsorship necessary for every contender and being a rank outsider.
It would spoil the film to reveal much more, but her pioneering proposal to faithfully re-create a perfectly wild space was so unique and astonishing that it won over the RHS selection committee. And then the work really began. “I knew someone who knew someone who knew of a company in Beirut that agreed to write me a letter confirming sponsorship,” smiles Reynolds. “It was very carefully worded so no actual amount was mentioned; they gave me a Euro, so it wasn’t a complete fib.”
But even as she was stressing about drumming up the finance she was obsessing about Collard, whom she’d met in gardening circles and been immediately drawn to; the only man she believed could deliver the garden she envisaged, complete with common weeds, rabbit droppings and a fairy mound.
“The garden couldn’t just be built by anyone, I needed it to be constructed with the right intent,” says Reynolds. “To get those people on side I needed Christy, but he was proving so elusive that eventually I followed him to the highlands of Ethiopia, where he was building a forest garden.”
In the film the juxtaposition between the lush landscapes of Ireland and the parched hills of Ethiopia is captivating. Reynolds freely admits to having been besotted with Christy and as their relationship starts to flourish so do her plans for her garden.
It’s no spoiler alert to say her victory was deemed to be iconoclastic. Commentators delivered elaborate encomia to Reynolds’ vision of nature untamed and she was even heralded as one of the top 10 garden designers of all time, alongside the likes of Capability Brown and Gertrude Jekyll.
“The garden really provoked a reaction from the public,” says Reynolds. “People of Irish origin would smile and laugh and say it was a little piece of home. English people and those from elsewhere would have the most extraordinary responses; they would burst into tears, sob uncontrollably and talk about places they had known and that no longer existed. They wanted to tell me their stories and I listened.”
Listening is a leitmotif that runs through Reynolds’ work. A single parent to 12-year-old Ferdia and Ruby, aged 10, from a relationship subsequent to her romance with Collard, she continues to live in County Wexford.
She gives talks, designs – after Chelsea came commissions including a biodiversity garden at Kew – and channels a lot of her energies into “writing myself out of a job”. Her new book, The Garden
Awakening, is a heartfelt, moving clarion call to tune into nature and weave atmosphere and memory into our green spaces. In the book she quotes WB Yeats’
The Stolen Child; its sweet melancholy reflects her own attitude to the earth.
“I look at the land the way a parent looks at a child,” she says. “A child is vulnerable and needs direction and form and to be moulded. You can leave it to grow wild but that’s not a great way to raise a child – or to manage the land.
“You can dress the land up with bedding plants that you plant and throw away when they’re finished, but that’s like dressing your child in a pink tutu and wanting them to look pretty and perform every day.
“The child, like the land, can’t help but grow and change. We should love them both regardless.”
Eventually Reynolds would like to set up a hands-on residential course where she would share her knowledge with like-minded souls. Until then, she proselytises with charisma – and a keen sense of humour.
“I know there are people who think I’m pure mad, and possibly I am – but I’m not a hippy,” she stoutly insists. “I might dress a bit like one but I don’t have the time or the inclination to lounge about talking bulls--- and smoking weed.
“I love the land like another living being,” she says with quiet tenderness. Perhaps, after watching Dare to be
Wild, a few more of us might just learn to do the same.
‘People would see my garden [at Chelsea] and burst into tears’