Spring 2008

Miss Wilmott's ghost: Eryngium giganteum

Above one of the mantelpieces in her drawing room there are lovely black and white photographs - one of Dillon at 18 when she was coming out, two of her wedding (a small affair in London). She doesn't like photographs. "I feel actually that old photographs of anybody are creepy - they are other times, they are other people. Even a photograph of me yesterday is not me."

She believes she has changed utterly from the young woman who came to Dublin in the early Seventies. "All of my 20s was very rackety - we won't even go into it. When I got to 30, we got this house and we got this garden and I sort of played at being middle-aged. I went to ladies' lunches and coffee mornings and charity days. I thought it was very amusing and very interesting. That business of the garden visit, the luncheon, the charity things - you can make a whole life for yourself out of it. I did it for a few years and then when I got to 40, it wasn't enough. I said: 'I've done all that.'"

Finally, without planning it, what had been the love of her life became a career. Even before she had moved into the house at Sandford Road, she was out the back digging and moving plants. Sybil Connolly directed visiting American groups to the Dillon garden. She was offered a regular slot at the Sunday Business Post and later the Sunday Tribune. There were more books, and then TV. On Gardening is a selection of her Tribune pieces. To this non-gardener, it has a reassuring whiff of no-nonsense authority and a sense of possibility.

Yet she's not satisfied with what she has achieved. "And as far as I'm concerned I haven't done enough. Don't ask me what else, but I feel there is something else that I need to do."

Is she happy?

"I'm getting happier in my skin. I think up to the age of about ten, one is oneself. Or I was myself. And then all these influences come in on you - bang, bang, bang - school and pressures and demands to conform to this or that, and I think I've only recently gone back to being myself. I think I'm just about getting the confidence to go back to being the real me, rather than the embroidered-for-presentation-to-the-public me."

And was Ireland good for that journey?

"Very, very much so. Enormously so. The moment I arrived in Ireland - it was a beautiful November day with that low sun, a frosty morning rather like this - I just thought this place was freedom. The shackles of the whole set-up - the English class system, basically, is what we're talking about - there was this great freedom because I think Ireland, socially, is incredibly more mobile. Probably the only way I could survive was to escape. I just felt I'd got away: 'Thank God, I've got away from it.'"

WHEN I venture that in some ways the old-time rigidity of the class system in Britain compares to the old-time rigidity of Catholicism in Ireland, she agrees enthusiastically. She thinks people such as her parents were brought up with an ancient doctrine they didn't know how to escape from.

Dillon's father died last year. Her mother is alive. She says none of her achievements were of any interest to them. "No. Not really. Well, I suppose my mother is quite pleased with the last book. She is actually reading it, which is amazing. I'm quite pleased about that."

Of her two brothers, one shares their parents' conventional views. Do they fight?

"When I used to drink, I'll tell you, it was serious. Serious conversation. But I don't drink now."

(She was, she says, "pretty keen" on drink. She gave up when she was writing one of her books. "It was taking up an awful lot of time - two hours a day, 14 hours a week. By being tired in the morning. And in the evening, instead of doing another hour's work, I'd sit down and drink.")

Dillon had a great aunt, Gylla McGregor of McGregor, who until her 80s was a fearless and intrepid traveller. "She was a sort of terror, I suppose an admirable terror. She liked gardening a lot." Like Gylla, Dillon is strong (at 16, the family dressmaker said she had the shoulders of a prize-fighter) and likes travelling.

"I like great empty places. I like places like Patagonia where all the clutter in one's head just disappears. There's so much clutter around: the clutter of thought and the clutter of things. Clutter. That really got to me: the emptiness of Patagonia - you could drive for 100 miles and you'd see nothing, just nothing, just a silvery sort of glass which goes on and on and on."

I ask if she gets some sort of spiritual uplift from gardening. "Yeah, I do. But I wouldn't do a big deal on it on that."

Maybe uplift was wrong word. On our way out to the garden I ask if she finds it restful. "Enormously. And I don't get rest from anything else much."