How blissful to discover and watch a 2011 Korean masterpiece drama like Heaven's Garden in 2021: a Work of Art so wholesome, so inspiring, so beautiful, yet so realistic and down-to-earth about the human condition. I have sorely missed K-dramas like this one recently: K-drama stories that do not emphasize sin and smut like too many are doing today. It seems more and more these days that Korea is sadly abandoning their former warmhearted romantic and endearing family dramas like this one, to try and emphasize evil crime-themed shows instead, with words like Evil, Devil, and Hell in the titles. I won't watch them, no matter who the actors are who are in them! Either that, or they are concentrating more today on boring soap operas, about cut-throat socialites, and showing who is sleeping with whom. Ugh. I simply won't watch that garbage! I stopped watching American television over a decade ago to escape it. I am convinced it's partly the American money pouring into Korean drama productions these days that is making them dwindle in quality compared to the beautiful classic K-dramas of the past like this one, that got me hooked on the genre in the first place.

There are no shocking deviant behaviors depicted in this wonderful, old-fashioned story, although one male character does manage to be a rather sophisticated-on-the-surface, but unlikable selfish scoundrel underneath. (There always seems to be at least one in most K-dramas, simply to emphasize how admirable the good characters are in comparison!).

This drama is also extra-special because it depicts a beautiful relationship between a mother character (Yoo Ho Jung, films I'm A Cyborg, But That's Okay, and Sunny) and her two young daughters, the older one not even her own biological child. Too many mother characters in Korean dramas have been more like interfering busybodies, or outright bitchy types: not here! This woman would give her life up for both her girls! I was also happy to watch this drama as soon as I saw darling Kim Sae Ron (High School Love On, Can You Hear My Heart?, The Queen's Classroom and hit films A Brand New Life and The Man From Nowhere) in the cast, whom I've loved and followed for more than a decade. How I happened to miss this great show on her resume over the years is anybody's guess! I'm so glad I finally rectified that mistake. She's wonderful in this role as an older, nurturing step-sister to a younger one (Ahn Seo Hyun, The Village: Achiara's Secret, Shark, film Okja).

Then we have veteran actor Choi Bool Am (Road Number One), playing the grandfather so brilliantly that he actually really seemed to be this farmer living in the country, who is slow to come around to liking his own grown daughter and her two young girls, especially the one who isn't his own biological granddaughter. 

The Story:

A loving, motherly-type woman in her mid-30's, Jung Jae In (Yoo Ho Jung), brings her two young daughters Eun Soo (Kim Sae Ron) and Hyun Soo (Ahn Seo Hyun) to live at her estranged father Jung Boo Sik’s (Choi Bool Am) home in a country mountain setting in Kangwon Province, although ostensibly just as a temporary measure while she tries to re-establish herself with her venture capitalist husband named Kang Tae Sub (Kim Ho Jin) who was jailed for business fraud and is soon to be released from prison. Jae In had been estranged from her father for years because he had not approved of her marriage to Tae Sub because he was a divorced man with a child.

When Jae In shows up with the girls to his property he is still aloof, and resentful of their presence, and is especially gruff with the older girl Eun Soo for not being his flesh and blood grandchild. This sensitive girl feels his reaction to her immediately, and tries her hardest to show him respect, regardless. It gets even tougher when Jae In leaves the girls with him and goes off to the city to meet up again with her errant husband and father of her youngest daughter. To her horror she discovers that another woman has met him at the jail before she could get out of her car and greet him! They drive off together laughing, leaving Jae In in shock. Later she calls him and berates him, demanding to know who this woman is. He lies and says she's just a friend and co-worker who is going to help him get on his feet again financially. Uh huh. We've heard that one before. This marriage is clearly in great distress.

 

Meanwhile the girls, who are back at Grandpa's farm, are trying to help him with his agricultural chores. Then the younger girl has an accident and the older girl goes running for Gramp's help. After things settle down again the strong Eun Soo confronts the grandfather on his lack of love for them; she runs away in distress, thinking she'll track down her birth mother in Seoul, a theater actress named Jin Joo Hong (Sa Kang).

For the first time Gramps shows signs of regret at being so cold toward these wonderful young girls. Eventually, when she is returned to the bosom of her family in the country, he actually starts to love Eun Soo in his own quiet way, and naturally starts to warm to the sweet younger Hyun Soo as well. In many ways Gramps becomes the father figure they never really had in their lives with any consistency. 

The Snake

Jae In returns to the farm and her girls and father, and prepares emotionally for a divorce from her wayward husband. It proves more difficult for her than she expected. She was so looking forward to her dream of having a perfect intact family, and letting the girls have a father again in their lives, but it doesn't look probable at all that this will happen. Then the snake tries to get back with her temporarily, and hatches up a scheme for a fake divorce that could help earn them some money. Against her better judgment, Jae In agrees, though it is breaking her heart.

Eun Soo Befriends Seung Woo

While this is happening she chances to meet a kindly coffee house business owner in town named Shin Woo Gyun (Hyun Woo Sung) and begins a tentative friendship with him. Woo Gyun is obviously an above average moral person: he even adopted another man's child, a little boy named Shin Seung Woo (Kang Chan Hee) as his own after that man went to prison. The boy knows he was adopted but isn't quite sure who his biological father is. When he discovers he is a criminal in jail he is devastated. Enter the beautiful soul older daughter of Jae In, Eun Soo, to teach him the truth that having two fathers, or two mothers, is not the worst thing in the world that can happen to children, that it actually makes them more special because when they are adopted they are chosen and loved for who they are as people, and not just because of biology.