Teresa Reviews Agatha Christie’s Garden (2006)
Teresa reviews Agatha Christie’s Garden (2006) and was disappointed at this shallow and uninformative look at her green thumb.
(c)2025 by Teresa Peschel
Is it entertaining? 1 Agathas
If you’re a serious gardener, you’ll be seriously disappointed.
Is it educational? 2 Agathas
You won’t learn anything you didn’t already know, and every time they break new ground, the film crew leaps back to what you already know.
Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.
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Of all the documentaries I’ve sat through for the Agatha Project, this is one I was really looking forward to. I garden. I garden a lot. I’ve transformed our quarter-acre of hardpacked clay into a bountiful mini-wildlife refuge of the Eastern Deciduous Forest, and still made plenty of space for ornamentals, useful stuff like clotheslines and compost bins, and food production. I learned how to garden in South Carolina and everything I learned there, I brought to Pennsylvania.
As a gardener, one of my favorite pastimes (besides perusing deceitful nursery catalogs which are the most remarkable pieces of fiction you’ll ever read) is visiting other people’s gardens. We’ve got fantastic public gardens in the mid-Atlantic region: Longwood Gardens, one of the greatest gardens in the world; Winterthur, a celebration of spring beauty; and Chanticleer, proving you don’t have to be huge to be fabulous. A new one, the Delaware Botanic Garden, packs the huge variety of the state’s flora into 37 acres outside of Dagsboro. The Hershey Botanical Gardens, with its world-renowned collection of roses, and its equally remarkable collection of weeping trees like I’ve never seen elsewhere. The Hagley Museum which is currently restoring the Ruined Garden, built by a DuPont heiress atop the remains of a gunpowder factory.
There are fabulous public gardens everywhere and if I can visit, I do! I recommend it. You can see what can be done with time and effort. If you’re willing to put in the work and spend the time, you too can have a wonderful garden in the smallest space. Even a balcony can burgeon with pots of flowers and carefully chosen shrubs.
Gardening is an unusual form of art. It’s not just three-dimensional like a sculpture. It’s four dimensions because you must allow for the passing of the seasons and the years. What you plant today will grow and look quite different in 20 years. Even more different with the passage of 50 years.
Gardens are more than a collection of plants. Does your garden have hard features like stone walls, winding paths, arbors and pergolas, follies and gazebos? How about water features from bird baths to acre-sized ponds stocked with expensive koi tempting local herons and racoons into feeding frenzies? Do you force your shrubs into topiary, making them sculptures in their own right like the stunning dragons’ teeth garden featured in Hallowe’en Party (2010)?
Bedding annuals so you can arrange an entire Persian carpet of flowers, made to be viewed from above? How about those prizewinning brassicas that earn you a blue ribbon every year at the county fair?
Agatha Christie didn’t get down on her hands and knees to weed, nor did she mow her lawns or trim her shrubs. But she loved gardens, walking through them, sitting on a carefully chosen and placed bench to look at the scenery and think. She and Max Mallowan bought Greenway in 1938. She’d always admired the property for its gorgeous vistas and rolling landscapes. Historical records show Greenway dates back to the 16th century, although the current house was built around 1790. Greenway has always been surrounded by vast gardens (30 acres or so), which changed to suit the current owner’s tastes but they always remained lush and romantic.
Add to this history the fact that England is a nation in which gardening is a competitive sport.
So from Agatha Christie’s Garden I was expecting greatness. I wanted a meandering walk up and down the footpaths that connected sections of the gardens. An in-depth tour of the greenhouses, one of which was used for commercial nursery plants in the ’50s. Greenway has a peach wall! A peach wall! How about touring the rockery on the slope east of the house? The camellia collection? The rhododendrons and azaleas gardens which Poirot wanders through in Dead Man’s Folly (2013)? The giant collection of dahlias?
How about the remarkable collection of subtropical plants made possible only because Torquay has a subtropical climate? Pam Ferris, our hostess, mentions them and then, as is typical of the entire documentary, the camera glides past the immense tree fern. I want to see the tree fern! These plant species date back to the time of the dinosaurs! I’ve admired them in Longwood Garden’s conservatory which protects them from Pennsylvania winters. Agatha had them growing in her garden outside as if she lived in Hawaii!
Will you see a tree fern? Admire its height and size? Learn where they originated because it sure wasn’t Great Britain? Hah! No more than you’ll get more than a passing view of the dahlias. No camellias at all. No rockery. No blaze of azaleas in bloom or the even more amazing blaze you get with banks of rhododendrons in full flower. As soon as the camera and Ms. Ferris enters the greenhouse, you’re back outside and the documentary switches – again — to blurry footage of an old woman portraying Agatha wandering pensively in a sepia-tinged, out-of-focus landscape. You’ll endure those scenes over and over and over.
Aargh! Show me the garden! Don’t tease me with a quick shot of the map of Greenway and some aerial footage and then spend 20 minutes of an hour-long film rehashing Agatha’s biography, including her eleven-day disappearance. I know all that stuff. I want her garden, which I do not know all about.
Why even bring up her running, via her gardeners, a commercial nursery? About winning prizes in the Brixton Horticultural Show? About commissioning the Agatha Christie Cup for winners at the Brixton Horticultural Show? The producers interviewed a nine-time winner of the Cup and never said what he grew to win the prize nine times! His dahlias? His brassicas? His roses? You won’t learn.
This documentary has its moments. You’ll get some serious time with Mathew Prichard (interviewed in Greenway), biographer Laura Thompson (in some park), biographer Janet Morgan (on Burgh Island), and Baroness P.D. James (in her home office). Do they discuss Greenway’s extensive gardens? They do not. Everything else, but not the shrubberies or the roses. The people who could seriously discuss Greenway like the head gardener, Nick Haworth, don’t get nearly as much airtime.
About the only mention you get about Agatha’s garden-sense is being told she had daffodils planted so she could admire them from a particular bench only to discover the following spring, the angle of the sun meant the daffodils turned away from her bench. So she had them ripped out.
You’ll feel ripped off. The overall shoddiness of the documentary, especially those tedious, out-of-focus, repetitive shots, go a long way to explaining why this was filmed in 2006 and not released until 2010. The production company either ran out of money or they were ashamed of a film that had very little to do with Agatha’s garden.
