If you are like me this winter and longing for the beauty and color of flowers This Beautiful Fantastic is a good film for you to enjoy. (It’s free on Amazon Prime Video)
The ambiguous title leaves us wondering what it is about. This Beautiful Fantastic ___?? The protagonist Bella Brown is a young woman whose life is as boring and lifeless as her name, with her failing writing career and her library day job. That is until she receives a warning that she’ll be turned out of her house if she can’t tame the wild wasteland of her garden.
“It’s not neglect, it’s more of a fear and loathing,” Bella tells her cranky old next-door neighbor Alfie Stephenson. Alfie is an avid horticulturist (a fancy name for a gardener) and has a gorgeous English cottage garden to show for it. But he has nothing but criticism for Bella especially because Irish cook Vernan would rather work for her than him.
Until they make a deal
Vernon will cook for Alfie, and Alfie will help Bella fix her garden.
As Bella and Alfie start to see the humanity in each other they form a friendship as teacher and student. As Bella works frantically to keep her home Alfie tells her, “You can speed read but you can’t speed garden”. He begins to open up to her the beautiful fantastic world of gardens.
“A totally blank canvas, the chance to create your own masterpiece”
Alfie gives Bella her first flower seeds: “Here. Helianthus. Giant sunflower. Start off with them, they are incredibly beautiful. They need a lot of light and heat. They follow the arc of the sun from dawn until dusk, extracting maximum energy from every day. It's a very... a very clever plant. Think about that.” He mixes practical growing advice with his salty wisdom.
My favorite scene is when Alfie lets Bella into his garden for the first time. She is given a heavenly vision of what a garden can be. While walking through the purple foxglove, brilliant dahlias, and deadly soapwort Alfie says, “It’s a world of beautifully ordered chaos. That’s chaos, not calamity because if you don’t understand the difference then we won’t progress very far”. That’s what gardening is, ordering the chaos of nature and nurturing it.
This movie fed my flower-loving soul with the sweet story of transformation and beauty. Not only does Bella learn how to garden but she also finds love and friendship.
Like Alfie, I want to open up for you the world of flowers. We’ve all experienced the joy a fresh bouquet of flowers gives you or the rapture of walking through a flower garden. I want to share my knowledge of flowers with you so you can share in this beautiful fantastic world of flowers.
Your Flower Farmer,
Annika DeMaster
Willow Haven Flowers
If you want to learn 5 tips for how to make your flowers last-longer in the vase download my free guide below!