About The Gardener
The Gardener (original title El Jardinero) is a Spanish dark comedy-thriller that premiered on Netflix on April 11, 2025. Created by Miguel Saez Carral, the six-episode series follows Elmer, a soft-spoken botanist who runs a roadside plant nursery on the Galician coast. After a childhood traffic accident left him with a brain injury that blunted his ability to feel ordinary emotion, Elmer moves through the world with an unnerving, deadpan calm, tending his greenhouse with the same detached precision he brings to the family's true line of work.
That work is contract killing, and the real head of the household is Elmer's mother, the unflappable China Jurado, who manages clients, logistics, and her grown son with brisk, domineering control. The nursery is the perfect front: quiet, out of the way, and full of reasons for strangers to come and go. The show mines its premise for deadpan humor, leaning on the absurdity of murder-for-hire run like a tidy small business and on the prickly, codependent push-and-pull between a manipulative mother and the emotionless son she has shaped to her purposes.
The careful arrangement cracks when Elmer is assigned to surveil Violeta, a warm and observant primary-school teacher, and instead finds himself feeling something for the first time in years. As his unexpected attachment collides with the assignment and with his mother's grip on the operation, the family's quiet equilibrium begins to unravel. Tonally offbeat and more interested in mood, irony, and character than in graphic violence, The Gardener became one of Netflix's most-watched titles in the weeks after its release.
