The recreation of Mary's garden was done by the original crew of botanist builders, including the real Christy Collard, who had built her Chelsea competition garden 14 years prior.
The director climbed several thousand feet to the top of a mountain in Ethiopia to get a single shot.
It took ten years for the director Vivienne De Courcy to make this film. She says, "The conventional risks involved in super-saturated color, environmental theme, and high romance - were obvious from the get-go and the critical politics of current "cool" stacked against us."
Because this was writer-director Vivienne De Courcy's first film, the real Mary Reynolds was skeptical about making her story into a film. But she soon changed her mind and developed a close friendship with De Courcy.
Regarding the film's cinematography, the director Vivienne De Courcy said she wanted it "to look like the sunburst landscape in Ireland. What I didn't want was another sepia-tinged blue grey-misted Irish film."