Daily Mail, September 5, 1991, by Jack Tinker
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The exquisite Sharon Maughan, having found instant fame and 
fortune among quick brew coffee, has been naturally anxious 
to show that her talents extend to something more durable.

I'm sure they do. But Louise Page's highly sentimentalised 
romance built around the 200-year life of a Sussex garden is 
hardly going to help her get back to her roots as a serious 
actress.

There is a great deal of seriousness, however, in Miss 
Page's slightly preposterous garden allegory (at least I 
think it's an allegory).

A great deal of earnest talk is expended on the ethics of 
preservation versus progress, both now and then.

And Miss Maughan, all decked out in dungarees and green 
wellies, representing the here and now, is allowed to get 
very passionate about her horticultural restoration of the 
garden created by botanist Richard Stephens (Simon 
Dormandy).

It begins as a labour of necessity - she is recovering from 
a nervous breakdown and has a young son to feed.

But it ends in a rather silly drama of love across two 
centuries - she going in for long flirtatious talks with the 
man whose inspiration she is dedicated to recreating.

Frankly, the chat about the ethics of giving a grant for the 
work are more convincing than Miss Page's historic 
contrivances which, although I am sure they are highly 
authentic, reek of the over-tilled soil of research.

Miss Maughan handles all this unlikely dialogue with 
passionate assurance.

One longs to know what she would do with something more 
rewarding than a wheelbarrow, a trowel and a ghost at her 
disposal.

Her scenes with her truculent young son, played with perfect 
and engaging aplomb by Alex Scott, are fresh as daisies.

However, one can't help but feel that Miss Page, a most 
challenging writer on other occasions, was wearing rose-
tinted spectacles when she penned this self-indulgent posy 
to the past.

It made me glad to have no more than a patio to drain my 
emotions.



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