Heartland has the Alberta foothills, the horses, and the sprawling ranch, but Amy Fleming and Ty Borden are the reason so many people kept coming back.. On paper, it was a familiar setup: a teenage girl mourning her mother, and a troubled city kid arriving on probation.
The show took its time with them anyway. It took eight full seasons just to get from their first meeting to their wedding day, and the story kept growing long after that.
Here are the moments that defined them, with seasons and episodes, plus what Amber Marshall and Graham Wardle have said about playing them.
Season 1: the ranch hand with a probation officer
Ty first appears in the pilot, “Coming Home” (October 14, 2007), as a new ranch hand at Heartland. Amy is 15 and has just lost her mother, Marion, in a truck accident. By the second episode, “After the Storm,” his probation officer turns up while he is showing Amy a jumping course he built for her in the woods, and her grandfather Jack agrees to be Ty’s sponsor.
It is a small gesture, made with his hands and without anyone asking, and it sets the tone for what follows. In “Come What May” (Season 1, Episode 7), Ty secretly asks Mallory for riding lessons to impress Amy.
The two leads were as new to each other as their characters. “We were relative strangers,” Graham Wardle told Brief Take in January 2019. Amber Marshall added that when the series started, Wardle “didn’t even know that horse culture existed.” He laughed and agreed: “I knew that people rode horses, I just didn’t know how many people still rode horses.” Marshall thought it suited the story. “My character knew horses, whereas the character of Ty was brand new even to the world of living in a rural environment,” she said.
The first kiss, and the note
The first kiss comes at the end of Season 1, in “Coming Together” (Episode 13, February 24, 2008). Ty coaches Amy through her Fall Finale competition on Spartan, and afterward they kiss in the stables. Then Ty leaves for Calgary to help his estranged father and doesn’t tell her. He leaves Amy a note.
That is the pattern for the next several seasons: a kiss doesn’t settle anything on this show. Ty returns in Season 2, and in “Dancing in the Dark” (Episode 4) he tells Amy why he left. But it takes until “Step by Step” (Season 2, Episode 18, March 22, 2009) for Amy to say what she has been avoiding. The two are stuck at the fishing cabin after the roads close, Ty falls ill and passes out, and Amy looks after him overnight. In the morning she tells him she has messed things up but has always loved him.
Breakups, and the reunion in “The River”
The relationship was never a straight line. In Season 4, Amy and Chase kiss after a show in “Road Curves,” and in “Mood Swings” (Season 4, Episode 10, January 2, 2011) she and Ty break up over her suspicions about Blair and her feelings for Chase. In “The River” (Season 4, Episode 15, February 27, 2011), Chase pulls his horses from Heartland, Ty goes to support Amy, and they kiss. In the same episode, Ty finds her in the woods after a bear throws her from her horse.
Marshall has said the back-and-forth was partly the nature of television. “With a television series you have to keep viewers interested by doing a lot of break-ups and arguments and drama,” she told Actor Blaine, “and a real relationship probably wouldn’t have lasted the 12 years.”
The proposal that didn’t land, and the one that did
Ty’s first try comes in “Crossed Signals” (Season 6, Episode 2, September 23, 2012). He proposes in the loft, and Amy says it isn’t special enough. He moves back to the trailer. It is painful and very much in character for both of them.
The second proposal is the one fans remember. In “Great Expectations” (Season 6, Episode 9, December 9, 2012), Ty and Amy go to set up a fishing camp for Stumpy’s family reunion, find a wild foal caught in a trapper’s snare, and take care of its wounds. After a walk along a river, Ty proposes. Amy says yes.
The wedding, after a near-elopement
The engagement lasted more than two seasons. By Season 8, Lou and Lisa’s wedding plans were overwhelming Amy. In “All I Need Is You” (Episode 17, March 22, 2015), Ty is arrested after a fight with Jesse, suggests postponing the wedding, and then learns the charges have been dropped. Amy decides they shouldn’t wait any longer and says they should marry on their own. They head to Pike River. By the season finale, “Written in Stone” (Episode 18, March 29, 2015), they have come back to Heartland, and Lou is relieved to learn they didn’t go through with it.
The wedding happens at Heartland instead. Amy and Jack ride Spartan and Paint from the barn to the house, led by Sugarfoot, which is Paint’s last ride before retirement. On their wedding night they get locked out of the Dude Ranch and go back to the loft, where their relationship began.
The scene was harder for Marshall than she expected. At a fan event in Toronto just before the episode aired, she told TV, eh?: “I was nervous the whole time. I couldn’t remember the vows, I got dizzy, I was more nervous filming this wedding scene than I was on my actual wedding day.” She also said fans had waited long enough: “I feel like if we waited any longer, people would start to get mad. It was time.” (Her real wedding is a story of its own: Amber Marshall and Shawn Turner’s horseback ceremony.) For more on the episode, see our look at why Amy and Ty’s wedding still makes fans cry.
Marriage, a daughter, and the harder middle
Marriage didn’t end the arguments. In “No Regrets” (Season 9, Episode 14, February 14, 2016), Ty becomes overly worried about Amy’s well-being, panics when she is bucked off a horse, and the two argue until she realizes what the misunderstanding is and explains it.
Season 10 tested them again. In “New Horizons” (Episode 4), Ty doesn’t want to miss Amy’s pregnancy for a trip to Mongolia, but Amy encourages him to go because he always supported her dreams. (The trip was a way to write around Wardle’s time off, the Calgary Herald noted.) Amy goes into labor in “Greater Expectations” (Episode 18, March 26, 2017), and the family welcomes their daughter, Lyndy.
Marshall and Wardle have both described the on-screen relationship as the thing that built their real friendship. “I think that the fact that we’ve been in a relationship on the show for twelve years has brought us closer together off-screen,” Marshall told CBC Life in January 2019. Wardle’s answer was about the work: “How do we tell this story in a way that is authentic and can make people connect with that sense of a family unit being loving and supporting?”
Season 14: saying goodbye to Ty
In Season 13, a single stray bullet from a poacher’s gun hits both Amy and Ty in “The Passing of the Torch” (Episode 10, November 24, 2019). Season 14 opens with the consequences. In “Keep Me in Your Heart” (January 10, 2021), Ty collapses within the first couple of minutes and dies of previously undetected complications from the wound. The episode then jumps ahead a year to a memorial for him.
Graham Wardle chose to leave. “I felt in my heart it was time to move in a new direction,” he told The Canadian Press, adding that he planned to talk more about the decision on his Time Has Come podcast. Marshall said he called her first, about two years earlier. “I was hurt. When he first told me, it stung a little bit,” she told the Herald. “But then, as I had time to process it, I understood it.”
She approached Amy’s grief with care. She told TV, eh? that “the longevity of the Amy and Ty story gave me inspiration as an actor to be able to feel the grief and sorrow of losing that character,” and that she and Wardle “remained very close friends off-set.” She also said the pandemic delay turned a planned six-month jump into a full year, which she believed made the memorial “so much stronger.” The loss still hits fans hard, and we looked at the whole love-and-loss arc of Ty and Amy in a separate piece.
What Ty left behind
The show hasn’t forgotten him. In “Leaving a Legacy” (Season 15, Episode 10, December 19, 2021), Amy finds a gift and card Ty had bought her for their sixth wedding anniversary. In the card he wrote that the two of them could leave a legacy. When a horse therapy center runs short of funds, she donates part of the winnings Ty’s mother, Lily, sent her and names it the Dr. Ty Borden Equestrian Youth Center.
It is a fitting last note for a couple whose best scenes were never about big declarations. They were about a jumping course in the woods, a note left behind, a night at a fishing cabin, and a family that kept going.
