Tending the Celluloid Garden

Life is not like the movies, especially when it comes to gardening. Looking after plants isn't considered the stuff of high drama, suspense or action adventure, so the garden, in film, tends to be a setting, a symbol or an idea.

The 1992 version of "The Secret Garden," for instance, might teach you a bit about renewal pruning; it might inspire you to design an elegant English garden for your yard -- or tidy up the messy one you've got. But it's really about healthy growth in children in an age when outdoor exercise didn't have to compete with TV.

On-screen, the practice of growing things often stands in for a cluster of wholesome qualities -- patience, industriousness, the desire to nurture -- giving us films such as "Greenfingers," in which a group of prison inmates makes a fine showing at an elite British flower show. In "The Karate Kid," a sort of Zen bonsai lesson serves as a warm-up to the young hero's training in martial arts ("Wipe your mind clean [of] everything but the tree"). Every western has its noble tiller of the soil, but he's rarely the lead character. For that you need the determined hunchback in "Jean de Florette" or the zealous Tom Joad in "The Grapes of Wrath," fleeing the barren Dust Bowl for the false promise of an agricultural Eden in California.