A garden designer has reinvented her Dublin garden - replacing the lawn with a striking, modern canal.

The new canal

Helen Dillon, Ireland's foremost plantswoman, garden television star, writer and lecturer, is standing in her first-floor Dublin drawing room, looking out of the high Regency windows. Below stretches her garden of just under an acre, where she has been creating magic for twenty-five years. Recently however, this celebrated view was transformed when the garden underwent a radical face-lift. The sweeping away of the lawn and its replacement with a bold, modern-looking canal set in sleek, sharply cut limestone has left Helen Dillon's admirers gasping.

Helen Dillon

'There's something very dramatic about this garden. It's like being at the theatre. We're sitting in a box up here in the drawing room, looking down on the stage below.' Helen's talk is rapid, witty, frank and irreverent, despite her august status as possessor of the Veitch Memorial medal. Wearing jaunty three-quarter-length trousers, a jersey the colour of delphiniums and a practical waistcoat with pockets for every kind of gardening weapon, she is poised for action, simmering with suppressed energy. In a moment, I find myself outside being introduced to the plants. The first we meet, growing on a north-facing wall, is a striking variegated Trachelospermum jasminoides, which Helen assures me is 'living off the whiff of an oil rag' and perfect for difficult city corners.

A walk round Helen Dillon's garden is a journey on which gardening mentors, friends and travels spring to life. Helen began to garden at the age of seven after she came face to face with a giant cardiocrinum growing in lonely splendour on the edge of the wood at home in Perthshire. Aged eight, she made an extensive collection of polyanthuses. Later, she progressed to a pre-teen passion for pelargoniums. Brushing past the wands of angel's fishing rods, Helen points to a furry but retiring sedum nestling in its pot: 'That's been with me since the Sixties. It sat on the balcony of my Chelsea flat.' Reverently, I draw closer, but already Helen is pointing at something else: 'You know what they say about Lady Hillingdon (the apricot rose)? No good in a bed but great against a wall.'

The Blue Border

Two long borders form the backbone of the garden. To one side stretches a dreamy blue vista, made up of the pea-flower heads of indigo goat's rue and Baptisia australis and stately spires of delphiniums and aconites, wafts of cornflowers and love-in-a-mist, spiky eryngium, silvery catmint, waving cerulean salvias. Opposite stretches a symphony of scarlet, mauve, hot orange and magenta: Scabiosa 'Chile Black', Lythrum rilgatum, fashionable Knautia macedonica, Cirsium rirulare, Rosa glauca, flame-coloured cannas, the lacy umbels of Angelica sylvestris 'Vicar's Mead' and Angelica gigas'. A wild exuberance of colours and forms exists within strictly defined lines. Everywhere in the garden are contrasts of colour and texture. Violet berries of Dianella tasmanica shine alongsidc apricot-petalled Abutilon 'Linda Vista Peach,' laced all over with scarlet veins like a blood orange. 'I'm torn,' Helen agonizes, 'by wanting to be a designer and a plantsman. I'm being pulled in every direction. That's why I'm always bad tempered.' Like all true artists, she is never satisfied with her work; as her gaze alights on a corner of the red border, she growls, 'Right now I want to throw buns at it.'

The Red Border

For many years, this garden has been the crucible in which Helen's gardening ideas have simmered before being broadcast to her readers and listeners. So, naturally, what happens here is a passionate source of interest and controversy to many. Helen Dillon has created something of a sacred beau ideal, an example of good design wed to inspired plantsmanship. When she ripped out her perfect emerald lawn which ran all the way up the middle of the garden, and replaced it with the canal, there were murmurs. 'People come and say in soothing voices of condolence: "It will tone down in time." But what they don't understand is, I don't want it to tone down.'

A rose-covered arch

There is more than a touch of the iconoclast to Helen Dillon. 'I am not a caretaker. I want to rip things up when I'm fed up with them. I want to invent things - to throw everything up in the air and see what comes down.' Bored by the 'glumly staring' lawn - which caused an agony of fussing for Val Dillon, Helen's antiques consultant husband Helen and Val decided it was time to indulge in a long-held dream. They loved the shallow pools full of reflections they had seen on visits to Morocco and the Alhambra in Granada. These inspired Helen in laying out the canal. Its clean, uncompromising lines slice through the garden, providing a rigorous contrast to floriferous borders and the romantic, rose-covered arbour. The canal forms the garden's main axis, announced at the nearer end by pointed Saracen hats of box and terminating in a fleeing stone nymph.

It would have been easy for Helen Dillon to rest on her laurels, but the tireless artist's spirit in her refused to be quelled in its search for something fresh, daring and more vivid. In her garden's current incarnation, she has achieved all this. It took guts, as she admits. Soft Dublin light falls on the limestone turning it to mauve and her garden rustles gently. Reflections of crimson and indigo glow through the dusk. The scene is set. I seem to feel the gardening mentors in the ether. There is an intake of breath. They are about to break out into applause.

From: House and Garden, May 2002
Text: Catherine Fitzgerald, Photographs: Andrew Lawson.