Obscure Occupations - Greensmen

Everyone knows what a greensman is, right?  Or do they?..... 

 

Non-obscure greenkeepers care for golf courses and do horticultural things like looking after the grass and the plants.  But that is not the occupation that I am going to look at. My obscure greensmen (aka greenspeople or greens for short) have an interesting job that I didn’t know existed, and I might want to be one when I grow up.  The obscure occupation is ....... greensperson in the film industry.  

 

These professionals are part of a film’s art department and they have a crucial but usually unnoticed specialist role. Greenspeople read the script and note where any vegetation is required. Then they research, source, place, maintain and care for all the trees, plants and vegetation on set, ensuring that every bit of foliage contributes to the visual story and matches the movie’s aesthetic. Think Deliverance, The Hobbit, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Bridgerton.  

 

A lot of their work is actually done indoors and might involve creating realistic gardens, lush forests or steamy jungles – on a concrete floor of a soundstage.  

 

Greenspeople also change the existing greenery of outdoors locations.  If a story line calls for a location to be shown over several years, or even seasons, it is the greensperson's job to transform winter into spring or to reflect the passage of time (decades, centuries) in the changing vegetation. It is the same with interior scenes set years apart – the house plants must be in keeping with the fashions of the period, and they need to grow or wither over time! 


 


Greenspeople are part of the entertainment industry so a lot of what they do is fakery. Beautiful flowers in a lush garden might be made of silk or plastic, live flowers might be glued onto non blooming plants, full grown trees might have arrived on set that morning in orange plastic pots that need to be cunningly disguised before being returned to the supplier the next day. 

 

One greensperson explained that the producers of “Meet the Parents” wanted to shoot an autumn scene in the winter, so she and the rest of the greens crew painstakingly placed fake, hand painted autumn foliage, leaf by autumn-coloured leaf, onto trees that were bare. “If it’s summer, they want winter; if it’s winter, they want summer.”  

 

It’s not an easy job and it’s not well paid, considering. Greenspeople need to be knowledgeable, creative and flexible. They need to know what to get and where to get it. They also need to know how to work safely with their props (so a hastily installed mature oak tree doesn’t fall on an actor or crew member). They might have to travel hundreds of miles to transport lorry loads of plants to a location and then return them safely. They frequently work horrible hours. 

 

I think Greenspeople deserve more recognition. Their work needs to be seamless because if there is a mistake it will be noticed! A daffodil in August, a non-native tree in a woodland or a houseplant growing in a forest will be spotted. 

I’m glad that I know about greenspeople now, but it will change the way I watch movies and TV shows. I know I’ll be full of admiration and respect, but I will also be keeping a watch for lapses in vegetation-related continuity!  

  

Here is Brian Massey’s IMDb Bio. Greensman and Greensmaster. Just to prove it’s a thing.


 

Jeanie - June 24

Comments

  1. CarolJuly 15, 2024 at 10:12 AM

    Fascinating stuff! I had never thought about this, but I'll definitely be checking out the plants next time I watch a film 🎥

    ReplyDelete
  2. BridgetAugust 28, 2025 at 5:08 AM

    Amazing, I know about quite a few background jobs in the film industry but never heard of this, and how fascinating - you would be a good one when you grow up. I will be watching now.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Idols

Image
  Francis Bacon was an English scholar and philosopher who lived from 1561 To 1626. Amongst other things he wrote and thought about thinking.   I was Googling “idols” and Francis Bacon’s Four Idols kept cropping up, so I read a bit about them and it seemed very difficult and complicated. Then I kept on reading about them and actually it’s not that difficult, in fact I think it’s really interesting.   As I said, Francis Bacon thought about thinking and, long before the birth of modern psychology, he understood that the human mind doesn’t always reason correctly. He argued that this fact needed to be understood before new ideas could be developed.   He advocated using inductive reasoning and experiments to gain insight and to prove or disprove a theory.   He wrote a book called Novum Organum and in it he outlined the Four Idols which (I think) basically described four major errors in mental processing that result in obstacles to new and innovative thinkin...
Read more
Image
  Propagation, oo-oo-oo Propagation Propagation's what you need, If you want to plant a seed, make a rose bush or a reed, Propagation’s what you need! If you’d like to make new roots, or grow some tasty fruits, Propagation’s what you need! If you want to grow a plant, but think that you can’t, Oo-oo propagation's what you need! Do you want to be a propagate-er, Ooooo!!! For those of a certain age, you may have broken into song. Memories of Roy Castle and the McWhirter brothers on Record Breakers have been (dare I say it?) propagated in your mind!   Plants for free! There are lots of different ways in which plants can be propagated; the most common is by sowing seeds, after all, this is how it is usually done in nature. Because seed production relies on flowers producing seed by combining male pollen with female ovule, the resulting seed may produce a plant with different coloured flowers from the mother plant’s, leaves might be larger or smaller, ...
Read more