{"id":74,"date":"2008-01-12T10:58:33","date_gmt":"2008-01-12T18:58:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=74"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:33:24","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:33:24","slug":"helen-dillon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/helen-dillon\/","title":{"rendered":"Helen Dillon"},"content":{"rendered":"

HELEN DILLON
\n<\/font><\/font><\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Last year’s Philadelphia Flower Show theme was “Legends of Ireland”\u009d.\u00a0 It was a celebration of all things Irish–plants, consumer products, lore, music, art, dance and ideas.\u00a0 It was also a tribute to the recent amazing resurgence of Ireland’s economy.\u00a0 The “Celtic Tiger”\u009d made its presence felt in many ways.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 With its long literary and horticultural histories, it is logical that Ireland would also produce inspiring garden writers.\u00a0 One of the best is Helen Dillon.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She has written several gardening books, the most recent of which is Down to Earth with Helen Dillon <\/em>(Timber Press, 2007).\u00a0 My husband bought me a copy for Christmas and I couldn’t wait to dip into it.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The book is a combination gardener’s guide and distillation of the author’s wit and wisdom on a host of topics.\u00a0 She starts out with an introduction titled, “I Shouldn’t Have”\u009d, a discussion of her own garden mistakes.\u00a0 Of course, Helen Dillon’s mistakes frequently look like other gardeners’ triumphs, but everything is relative.\u00a0 One of those “mistakes”\u009d was a nine foot-tall Victorian fountain that looked like an oversized wedding cake and came to dominate her garden.\u00a0 After trying everything she could think of to minimize its size or mitigate its garden domination, Mrs. Dillon finally got rid of the fountain.\u00a0 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. <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The book’s three parts, “Beginners’ Stuff,”\u009d “The Middle Ground”\u009d and “Fancy Stuff”\u009d cover all aspects of the gardening experience.\u00a0 I especially liked “Why did it die?”\u009d an essay in the beginner section.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 No matter what the cause, plant death usually invokes guilt.\u00a0 It’s comforting to know that even Mrs. Dillon goes through such experiences, can blame herself, laugh about it and move on.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I am always misplacing trowels, so I can also empathize with the “Vanishing tools”\u009d 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.\u00a0 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.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Now that it’s catalog season, the back-to-back pieces on “Questionable plants”\u009d and “Plants worth searching for”\u009d in the middle section come in very handy.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Only a score of those hundreds are really worth growing and only a handful are garden greats.\u00a0 The hard part, for her and for the rest of us, is finding those great plants.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I take a shine to anyone who refers to garden centers as “the church of the people.”\u009d \u00a0Mrs. Dillon is also eloquent and funny on all the ways that we and she pursue our gardening “religion”\u009d–in garden centers, on our own properties and on visits to other gardens near and far.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The essay “Has it got a little brother?”\u009d 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.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Like all good gardening writers, Helen Dillon’s tone is highly personal.\u00a0 There are lots of beautiful color photos of the author’s garden, many of which were taken by Mrs. Dillon herself.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It’s also interesting to read her description of the many changes that the garden has undergone during its owners’ long tenancy.\u00a0 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\u00a0 year or the year before when the book was written.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

Someday, with luck, I will hop a flight to Dublin and visit Helen Dillon’s garden.\u00a0 Until then I can reread Down To Earth<\/em> and let my gardener’s imagination take me to Ireland.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HELEN DILLON \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Last year’s Philadelphia Flower Show theme was “Legends of Ireland”\u009d.\u00a0 It was a celebration of all things Irish–plants, consumer products, lore, music, art, dance and ideas.\u00a0 It was also a tribute to the recent amazing resurgence of Ireland’s economy.\u00a0 The “Celtic Tiger”\u009d made its presence felt in many ways.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 With its … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1705,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions\/1705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}