HELEN DILLON
Last year’s Philadelphia Flower Show theme was “Legends of Ireland”. It was a celebration of all things Irish–plants, consumer products, lore, music, art, dance and ideas. It was also a tribute to the recent amazing resurgence of Ireland’s economy. The “Celtic Tiger” made its presence felt in many ways.
With its long literary and horticultural histories, it is logical that Ireland would also produce inspiring garden writers. One of the best is Helen Dillon. Though she was born in Scotland, Mrs. Dillon has lived with her husband in Dublin for more than thirty-six years, and her celebrated home garden is often open to the public. She has written several gardening books, the most recent of which is Down to Earth with Helen Dillon (Timber Press, 2007). My husband bought me a copy for Christmas and I couldn’t wait to dip into it.
The book is a combination gardener’s guide and distillation of the author’s wit and wisdom on a host of topics. She starts out with an introduction titled, “I Shouldn’t Have”, a discussion of her own garden mistakes. Of course, Helen Dillon’s mistakes frequently look like other gardeners’ triumphs, but everything is relative. One of those “mistakes” was a nine foot-tall Victorian fountain that looked like an oversized wedding cake and came to dominate her garden. After trying everything she could think of to minimize its size or mitigate its garden domination, Mrs. Dillon finally got rid of the fountain. Just about every gardener I know has done something similar, even if the offending garden decoration was a less conspicuous pot or plant or statue.
The book’s three parts, “Beginners’ Stuff,” “The Middle Ground” and “Fancy Stuff” cover all aspects of the gardening experience. I especially liked “Why did it die?” an essay in the beginner section. Everyone has had plants die on them; sometimes it is the fault of the gardener, sometimes the plant was weak to begin with and sometimes there is no discernable explanation at all. No matter what the cause, plant death usually invokes guilt. It’s comforting to know that even Mrs. Dillon goes through such experiences, can blame herself, laugh about it and move on.
I am always misplacing trowels, so I can also empathize with the “Vanishing tools” essay, in which Mrs. Dillon owns up to the fact that if her secateurs or clippers didn’t have red handles, she would probably lose two of them a day. Many of us know what it’s like to have tools–either indoors or outdoors–that seem to have minds of their own and disappear at will.
Now that it’s catalog season, the back-to-back pieces on “Questionable plants” and “Plants worth searching for” in the middle section come in very handy. We’ve all been seduced by a glamorous catalog or online photo and we’ve all been disappointed when the same plant turns out to be spindly or washed out or only good for one season. Mrs. Dillon reminds her readers that with the boom in plant hunting and plant breeding, there are literally hundreds of species and cultivars of many popular garden plants. Only a score of those hundreds are really worth growing and only a handful are garden greats. The hard part, for her and for the rest of us, is finding those great plants.
I take a shine to anyone who refers to garden centers as “the church of the people.” Mrs. Dillon is also eloquent and funny on all the ways that we and she pursue our gardening “religion”–in garden centers, on our own properties and on visits to other gardens near and far. As a veteran of garden open days she has a lot to say about garden visitors, especially those who steal seeds, cuttings or even entire plants. The essay “Has it got a little brother?” contains excellent advice for those of us whose scruples prevent us from theft, but who covet another gardener’s plants enough to ask for pieces of them.
Like all good gardening writers, Helen Dillon’s tone is highly personal. There are lots of beautiful color photos of the author’s garden, many of which were taken by Mrs. Dillon herself. I will probably never try an all-red border like hers because I am not sure that I could cope with such a tricky color, but I love the rill that runs through the Dillon layout. It’s also interesting to read her description of the many changes that the garden has undergone during its owners’ long tenancy. Since change is the one constant in life, I suspect that the Dillon garden today is different in small, if not large ways from the garden that its creator described last year or the year before when the book was written.
Someday, with luck, I will hop a flight to Dublin and visit Helen Dillon’s garden. Until then I can reread Down To Earth and let my gardener’s imagination take me to Ireland.