Helen Dillon (born 1940 in Dunning, Perth and Kinross), is a Scottish and Irish gardener, garden designer and lecturer, and media personality, who operated one of Ireland's most-visited private gardens for 44 years.[1]
Dillon later moved to London, and worked for a time for Amateur Gardening magazine, where she met gardeners and garden designers, and as an antiques dealer. She moved to Dublin when she married fellow antiques dealer Val Dillon.[1]
The Dillons managed one of Ireland's most-visited private gardens on a one-acre site behind a Georgian terraced house on Sandford Road in Ranelagh, an inner southern suburb of Dublin, from 1972 to 2016.[1] The garden was named by one of the UK's leading gardeners, Christopher Lloyd, in his book Other People's Gardens, and is listed in other reference works. However Dillon did comment on the challenges of building up the garden, especially around aging of the soil, and the pests and diseases which tend to develop in older garden environments, including weevils, fungal rust, and persistent weeds.
After the Ranelagh property sold for over 4.5 million euro, and the Dillons moved on in September 2016, they relocated to Seafield Road, Monkstown, where a new garden was announced in 2018, opening for group visits, and with plans for classes.[3]
Dillon has presented The Garden Show, Garden Heaven (which also featured Dermot O'Neill), and Antiques Watch for RTÉ, Ireland's national State broadcaster.[2] She also co-presented Greatest Gardens for the BBC, with Diarmuid Gavin.[4]
Dillon and her garden appeared on television, and the developing new garden was also featured on Gardeners' World, and was mentioned on Radio Ulster'sGardeners Corner, in 2017.
Dillon has designed gardens over more than twenty years, including work on the garden at Kiltinan Castle, Fethard, Co Tipperary, for Andrew Lloyd Webber, for the American Embassy in Dublin, and on Roy and Patty Disney's garden in County Cork.[2]
Dillon wrote a gardening column for the Sunday Tribune in the early 1990s. She has also written for The Garden, the magazine of the Royal Horticultural Society.
