"The Kids are All Right" is a Gardening Movie - Who Knew?
By now I bet you’ve heard something about the new Annette Benning- Julianne Moore-Mark Ruffalo movie called The Kids are All Right, at least enough to know it’s about kids with two moms who find their dad, and it’s getting rave reviews. (That link is to a fabulous website for movie reviews).
But the surprise to this movie-goer was discovering that Julianne Moore plays a fledgling garden designer and that a big chunk of the movie is about the design and installation of her first garden as a professional. Doncha love seeing gardeners in movies? Not since Jude Law played a landscape architect in “Breaking and Entering“.
So what do we learn from the garden design+installation scenes in “The Kids are All Right”?
Moore’s character is presented to us as a ne’er-do-well trying another in a long line of attempted careers, yet she proceeds to create a beautiful garden her first time out of the gate, so viewers might walk away with the impression that garden design is so simple that even amateurs can do it, and succeed at it. Hmm, not a message the garden designer/landscape architect professions would exactly rally around.
But on the bright side, the customer got what he wanted, he loved it, WE love it, and that’s great advertisement for hiring a designer (though maybe not a fledgling one you happen to run across?)
There’s also a really interesting small part in the movie – Moore’s hired worker, and a very real person.
So, what about the garden? I can’t find a single photo of the before OR the after garden in the movie but I can tell you it’s somewhere in California, so it looks nothing like the ones we grow here in Maryland. It reminded me a lot of a Los Angeles garden I visited once - my garden designer friend Shirley Bovshow‘s very own garden. Here’s just a taste of her garden.
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Garden from "The Kids Are All Right"
Yes, it’s in Echo Park. The house was built by my father’s great-uncle in the 1920’s. He was sort of the Luther Burbank of his day and the entire back yard is terraced - none of that was done just for the movie. At one time there were 30 fruit trees and 75 rosebushes on the property. They did a nice job of redoing the landscaping for the movie. My family owned the house from the time it was built until 2004 when we sold it after my dad died and my mom became disabled. Many things have been filmed on the same street, including “Indecent Proposal” with Robert Redford and Demi Moore, which was filmed three blocks down the street. Many peripheral film industry people live on the street.
The Kids are Alright House
So, my boyfriend and I were walking in our neighborhood a few weeks ago and saw this house. I believe its the one from the movie. It’s on a hillside in Echo Park directly across a valley from our street. Have no idea how I missed it until now. But I think its it:
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