Although Growing Up chronicles Dan’s growing awareness and education about planting this third film is truly where he learns to cut his cloth.
This is where Dan gets an opportunity to create a large garden in Barnes from a family friend and that in turn leads to his first opportunity to garden ‘without borders’. This experience of creating a garden at Home Farm also coincided with the start of his travels to the Picos Europa, to the Valley of Flowers in Northern India and eventually to Jerusalem. Observing plants in the wild taught him that if you understand where they grow and what grows with them then you can use them sympathetically.
What is clear from this film is the long term relationship that Dan forms with the work he is doing, the sense of disappointment at leaving a garden he has been working on for 3 years (‘we’d only just started’) and yet the hunger for new discoveries.
