Directed by Sébastien Chabot. Reviewed by Paul Sorrell

Part of the Architecture and Design Film Festival 2021, The Gardener is a tribute to American horticultural pioneer Frank Cabot and the celebrated garden, Les Quatre Vents, he established at La Malbaie in the Charlevoix region of Quebec. Scion of a patrician New England family, Cabot took on the garden project to distract him from a series of business failures after his family had acquired the rural property close to a “vacation colony” for wealthy Americans.

The film consists of interviews with Cabot shortly before his death in 2011, interspersed with commentary by his wife Anne, son Colin and others who knew and admired him and the garden he created. Garden guru Penelope Hobhouse describes him as a visionary eccentric, “a genius — or almost a genius”.

Cabot was also a philosopher of the outdoors, and muses articulately about the impact that the garden has on visitors — sometimes bringing them to tears as they make connections with key moments of joy or loss in their own lives. For Hobhouse, gardens like this can not only enhance a person’s physical health, but bolster their moral wellbeing.

Cabot believes that visiting a garden should be a sensual experience, appealing to all our senses and eliciting the full range of human emotions, from joy to fear — the latter effect provided by a pair of swing bridges inspired by travels in the Himalayas. The last thing he wants his garden to be is predictable. He seeks to surprise and delight visitors — even disconcert them — by offering a series of sharply contrasting vistas as they move from one area to another. Tree-lined avenues culminating in impressive arches or towers are one way of achieving this. Intensive thought and planning is involved in introducing new features. Two Japanese structures took many years to be completed — four years alone for the wood to be selected and seasoned by the expert Japanese builder.

The film works hard to reassure us that Cabot was no elitist. He first threw the gardens open to the public to support a local nature centre, and later established a garden conservancy programme that has preserved many fine North American gardens that might otherwise have been lost. Les Quatre Vents acknowledges the garden’s place in the wider landscape, leading visitors out to the fields and woods of the Quebec countryside beyond its borders.

Even if you are no gardener, this easy-going doco is worth a look.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 261 July 2021: 28