Hand's down it's for the fabulous kitchen garden in the contemporary comedy, It's Complicated.The movie's plot may be about the aftermath of divorce with more than a few twists and turns, involving the ex-husband and collateral relationships; yet the real star is the garden.

Yeah, Meryl's all earthy and sassy, Alec is his usual naughty self and Steve is once again the underdog boyfriend; but check out the garden. Look at the juicy, red tomatoes on tall tuteurs punctuating this productive potager. See the cabbages all color-coordinated with the sky-blue delphiniums. Everything in this romantic garden is at the peak of perfection. And like everything else in Hollywood, it's a little fake.

We gardeners know it's all movie-land magic. We know that the tomatoes are wired onto the plants, as much as we know those cool-season flowers might not be blooming when those warm-season fruits are ripening. But just as there is poetic license with the plot, we allow the garden a little leeway.

Maybe it's Meryl and her star-power, maybe it's the fact that vegetable growing took off in this downturn economy, but this garden struck a chord. I have to think it went beyond the middle-age-woman demographic. Although Meryl did make us look good. It's so cool that gardening is considered cool, even though we already knew it ourselves.

I just happened to blog about the garden a few days after the movie opened. At that point, my personal gardening blog, The Garden Buzz, was in its spindly seedling phase. The search words, "garden in movie it's complicated" showed up over and over again in my blog stats. In fact it's still buzzing with it.

With that blog post I got lucky while making my own luck; lots of readers found me (among the ba-zillions of blogs out there) because of the movie. I'm grateful to the set designers for making such a memorable garden worth writing about.

When I get the chance, I'll have to thank the academy.

(Thanks to IGN for the publicity photo)