There can't be a soul who is reading this column who doesn't know who Helen Dillon is. But, just in case you have been imprisoned for several years without the benefit of television, newspaper or gardening friends, here's the nutshell. She is quite simply, one of the most knowledgeable, meticulous and brilliant gardeners in this country, with a garden that must rank as one of the best town gardens in the world. She has written a number of very good books on plants, and for the past couple of years she has presented The Garden Show on RTE. From 1992 to 1995 she was the gardening correspondent for the Sunday Tribune.
A collection of her columns for that paper has just been brought out in book form by the publishers, Town House. Called, neatly, Helen Dillon on Gardening, it'll set you back £10.99 - and a better eleven quid you will rarely spend on yourself or your garden. In fact, with the help of its contents you will soon double and treble your investment by learning how not to kill plants and how to successfully increase their numbers. As well as that, you will find yourself entertained, educated and encouraged.
And you will be safe in the hands of a woman who has spent years up to her elbows in the soil. One look at her magnificently marked and scored digits will tell you that she is a real gardener. (My own hands - I wear gloves - are shamefully virginal in comparison, and often before meeting other keen gardeners I am tempted to sandpaper my fingertips and rub some honest muck into them.) But never mind the hands, just look at the brains. I don't know of another garden writer - except Christopher Lloyd - who writes about plants with such total conviction, engagement and authority.
Her discourses on particular groupings of plants - which appear to glide off the keys of her word-processor - are masterly, extensive feats of plants-womanship and persuasiveness. We read eagerly about plants for the reluctant gardener (Japanese anemones, nerines, Geranium endressii and Fuchsia magellanica), because we're all reluctant gardeners at some time or other. And because we're still not certain how we feel about variegated plants, we lap up her advice on what makes some of them acceptable: a "clean and handsome variegation", not "a dizzy combination of green and ivory-yellow, with streakings and splashings of dried blood on top" as in the case of the "unspeakable" Persicaria virginiana, "Painter's Palette".
And, in a tour de force on hardy geraniums, she rattles off the names and descriptions of no less than 19 varieties. Here she is on Geranium macrorrhizum, a geranium "suitable for the throw-it-into-the-soil-and-stamp-on-it school of gardening . . . If you can't remember the name," she advises, "just look for the geranium with the very sticky, clammy, aromatic leaves - once sniffed never forgotten. (The leaves of this species provide oil of geranium.) G. macrorrhizum is unspellable, unkillable and utterly charming.
Unbeatable for growing in nasty dry shady places, it'll be only too pleased if you put it in your best bed." I'll bet garden centres were sold out of that sticky, charming geranium within days.
G. macrorrhizum - or forms of it - can be bought without too much difficulty. Not so some of the other plants that Helen Dillon "bangs on about" (as she would say herself), but she makes no apology. Quite the opposite. "Gardeners who bleat `Where can I get it?' and are not prepared to go further than the nearest garden centre make me sick." Whoa, steady on there, Ms Dillon! (But privately we all know exactly the sort of gardener she means.)
Helen Dillon is not just hard on certain kinds of people (plant thieves, pushy English gardeners at the Chelsea Flower Show, inhabitants of Palmerston Park with inappropriate gardens and people who want to know how to rid the lawn of moss), she is also imaginatively rude about some plants. The pillar-box red bracts of the poinsettia, for instance are "crepe paper cut-outs, first cousins of the Christmas cracker", while "manmade" gladioli "are a disastrous garden plant and should remain where they belong, in vases of water on hospital bedside tables."
This book - like all the best gardening books - is not just about plants and gardening, but also about human nature: acquisitiveness, vanity, impatience and patience, despair and hope. And don't mind the sometimes imperious and bossy tone. Like a plant with a particular characteristic, it's probably in Helen Dillon's genes: she is a member of an ancient, titled Scottish family. But I think we are lucky to have her here. And on my bookshelf anyway, this book will enjoy a position next to that other opinionated, prickly and infinitely inspiring writer, Christopher Lloyd.