“It’s a great story and I think people recognise that it was a great story.” Reynolds finds the whole thing “a bit surreal”, but she understands why De Courcy was so interested in her. “I don’t expect a lot of the critics who like dark edgy films to like it.” “It was an extremely tough sell,” admits De Courcy. It’s not that often that we see films about landscape gardening, with, you’d argue, good reason. The pair were “very much philosophically aligned”, says De Courcy. She “rocked up with a lot of attitude and tulle dress dragging around mud in the building site”. She met Reynolds when she hired her to design her garden in west Cork. They’re not too far from her debut film, though – they were both based on Gaia theory, which posits that the world is a ‘superorganism’. She has been writing screenplays for years – 15 at last count – including two science fiction epics which were written in the 1990s. She says her passion for wild places and natural habitats runs right back to her childhood, when she would go on nature study walks with her father, “a fossil book in one pocket and wild flower book in the other”. Both Collard and Reynolds are still gardeners - he is behind Future Forests, an environmental project in Ethiopia, while Reynolds is a designer and writer.ĭe Courcy currently lives in London, but has a house in west Cork. Their love affair is at the heart of the film, which takes a very romantic look at what happened. (There are lots of photographs of the process on Collard’s site, showing the hard work and craic that went into the process.) She managed it despite not having the £150k sponsorship needed – and had to go to Africa to convince Christy Collard, who is played by Tom Hughes (currently starring in the TV series Victoria) to work with her. Reynolds was 28 when her Celtic creation won a gold medal at Chelsea – making her the youngest winner ever. The film, written and directed by De Courcy and starring Emma Greenwell (Love and Friendship) as Wexford native Reynolds, also hopes to spread the message to viewers about the importance of looking after our wild habitats. The former corporate finance employee has just released her first film – and it’s also a rather inspiring tale, that of an Irish gardener (Mary Reynolds) who despite many odds stacked against her won the Chelsea Flower Show in 2002. IF YOU EVER thought a mid-life career change was an impossibility, then Vivienne De Courcy’s story will convince of how wrong that assumption is.
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