Spring 2008

Like some of her beloved plants, Helen Dillon blossomed late in life. Now her cut-glass tones and impish face are familiar to garden lovers all over the country But the journey to her present oasis of serenity has not been without its difficulties, she tells Patricia Deevy.

Helen Dillon

As we enter her garden, I warn Helen Dillon that my reactions will be unsullied by knowledge. She doesn't seem to mind. Replaying the tape, I can only cringe. One specimen is described as "a pancake plant", another, "a fluffy bunny kind of plant" (you'd have to have been there). Best of all is when I enquire about the "pointy doo-dah over there" (a cone-shaped box tree).

Dillon shows me a plant of the verbena family, and I ask about the verbena tea variety. We scoot across to the other side of the garden, she pulls a few leaves from a bush against the wall, hands me one and urges me to crush it and inhale. "Squash that, squash it. Isn't it good?" Later, in the glasshouse, we're like junkies - silently, desperately, sniffing the crushed leaves of a rose geranium. "This is the best scent," she says. "Try this leaf. Squash it, squash it, squash it."

Apart from green fingers, Helen Dillon's gift is giving encouragement - she doesn't believe gardening has to be hard. Her coaxing, her enthusiasm, and occasionally a dose of exasperation or bossiness, combine in her new book On Gardening. Even for non-gardeners, its lively prose and month-by-month survey of the year make it a good read. Gardeners will treat it like a handbook. She believes some of the experts - whose names are off the record - are a bit precious in their approach. (Not to speak of being dull, I say, and she agrees.) "I hate this attitude that gardening is some kind of secret thing and that there's a right way and a wrong way. It's just to get people out there and get them started."

Hellebores: one of Helen Dillon's favourite plants.

The reasons why she might be zealously egalitarian become clear when I ask about her background. She grew up in Scotland, near Perth. That's all she says before announcing that she doesn't want to talk about it. We have a long discussion about the whys and wherefores of her reluctance - which boil down to the fact that having been born into the upper reaches of the social ladder (she is, by birth, and 'Honourable', as in the Hon. Mrs Val Dillon - something the very correct Sybil Connolly insisted on calling her when the Dillon garden was included in the joint book on Irish gardens), she feels as much a victim of the British class system as someone born in a less advantaged position.

"I've been fighting all my life to say I'm going to become something in my own right which isn't to do with that. I was born with a traditional silver spoon thing and then I turned around in the Eighties and said: 'Hold on, it's not a silver spoon thing. It's actually a disadvantage. It's something I have to hide in Ireland, play down.'

"In point of fact, I think it was a very oppressive upbringing. Not that my parents meant it that way - it wasn't done with unkindness. I've met other women of my age - brought up in Scotland (Scotland was particularly bad) - who felt the same. [They] felt - well, being women, that they were second-rate anyway and their education didn't matter awfully much, and all they had to do was get married."

It's understandable that she would be cautious. For mean-minded people, her voice is enough of a 'colonial' calling card. Both clipped and smoky at once, it is as distinctive and unyielding as one from the furthest tip of Kerry. When rushing to explain something, or to finish a long point, she speaks without pausing for breath: "I'mgoingto'MericaTuesday," or "'Sabore" ("It's a bore"). She loves doing RTE's gardening show, especially since, because of her accent, television was something she thought she'd never get the chance to do in Ireland.