Great Craic with Helen Dillon

Helen Dillon

My jaws are yet aching today after a great night with a unique stand up comedian.Hats off to The Limerick Garden Plants group who had Helen Dillon down from the big smoke to talk to the Gardeners of Limerick last night at the South Court Hotel. Helen is really funny -a bit of a deadly wit actually! She does a great line in telling it like it is so while many of her slides showed beautiful photos of her garden in proficient bloom there was also a gallery of failures. She explained the Irish expression of "it died on me" really translates into "I killed it" and honestly described how she has evolved from posh muted colour coordinated borders to "box of smarties" with loads of different colours in the borders.

She is fiercely direct and honest and feisty as hell! She has great tales of Christopher Lloyd and other famous gardeners she hob-nobbed with and is brilliantly self-depreciating in her re-telling of how people would come up to her after her Irish television career had finished to check it was really her because, as she puts it "everyone thought I was dead"!

A great Lady of Irish Gardening (even if we had to originally steal her from Scotland).Even I , a person prone to growing plants with a view to eating them can appreciate, and be inspired by such a passionate and energetic ornamental gardener (though to her credit she grows some veg in carefully tucked away raised beds hidden behind a sunny border in her garden). If you want the Dillon experience read any of her books, she also writes for Which Magazine and writes in the monthly Catholic "Messenger" (which got her a lot of new fans in the nuns!) and you can visit her beautiful garden in Dublin. Highly, highly recommended!

The Dillon Garden in Dublin

Slow, slower, slowest......

Sorry everyone, since the storm last month the internet service has been reliably awful. I can't post anything successfully, but, finally! the man over the phone opened a small window for me today with a temporary fix (that is coming and going all morning )and better yet a man with a tool box is coming out next Thursday, so hopefully I will be back blogging with a vengeance on Friday! In the meantime keep sowing and growing, and mind yer ankles!