Should you meet your heroes?
Matthew Pottage scans his shelves and realises he has met several of his horticultural heroes. Who lived up to his expectations, who made him laugh, and who was the one author who got away?
Dr Hessayon
My first ever gardening book was Dr Hessayon's The Tree & Shrub Expert, followed swiftly by his The House Plant Expert and then The Indoor Plant Spotter. The reason they were such a successful series, I suspect, and certainly so much to my own liking, was the concise summaries of the "need to know" information, usually coupled with a decent photo.
As I grew older, I started to detect his personality coming through the pages too. He could be blunt, even slightly patronising. I remember one difficult-to-please houseplant whose description opened, "This plant certainly isn't for you."
Dr Hessayon was something of a gardening bookshelf legend, and I remember the fascination of him appearing from the depths of Norfolk as keynote speaker at an awards dinner in London. As expected, his words were somewhat controversial, woven with dry wit and, dare I recall, raising a few eyebrows. I remember quietly chuckling away over my impossibly small dessert, trying not to wind the people next to me with my elbows, as those events always seem to cram an uncomfortable number of people around a table.
Helen Dillon
Playful language, personality and knowledge are strands that I've grown to love in gardening books and articles. I don't always learn about new plants, but if it's about gardening and it makes me smile, I'm very happy to bathe in any level of wit.
It wasn't long before I became a recipient of the RHS magazine, The Garden, probably from around 2004, and the first column I would always turn to was that of Helen Dillon, the renowned Irish plantswoman, sharing her gardening wisdom and thoughts. Nobody other than Helen could explain why she liked to grow her cannas in dustbins and make it sound socially acceptable, while casually putting down anyone who liked statues, pointing out that they are the pretentious person's equivalent of garden gnomes. I often wonder whether people reach an age where they simply don't care if others disagree with them, or whether the wit and confidence are embedded from an early age.
A gardening friend in Ireland called Bruno knew Helen well, and many years ago, before she downsized, he organised a visit to her Dublin garden. I was slightly dubious about meeting this legend whose words I'd lapped up for years, in case she was something different in real life that would destroy my affection for her. I needn't have worried. We were treated to a lovely lunch with her and her husband, Val, and we were falling about laughing as she gave a blunt and honest tour of the garden.
Her generosity with plants was somewhat overwhelming, and I came away with a beautiful hardy Adiantum, which I still have to this day, and a variegated Agave. The latter is of particular interest, being a white variegated form of Agave bracteosa, which is really not something you see every day. She came bumbling out of the greenhouse with it and my eyes lit up.
