Book Review ~ Down to Earth with Helen Dillon

I recently read Down to Earth with Helen Dillon.

Advice and inspiration from one of the world's great gardeners.

I loved Helen's wit.

I want to share a few paragraphs from her book that made me smile.

From the chapter..

Potting shed

"Tranquillity. Even saying the word has a calming effect. To me, the key to serenity is my shed. It has a lovely feeling of peace, and the good thing is that nobody knows exactly what I'm doing there. In reality I'm probably just standing still, gazing out of the window. But if footsteps approach I start banging pots about, hoping that whoever's coming along will think I'm too busy to be disturbed."

"Since the last time the shed was tidied, things have built up. The problem is all the bits of wire, boxes, trays, screws, string, plant ties, blunt pencils, drying seedheads, nails rusty and shiny, bags paper and polythene, stakes with one end snapped off, paintbrushes solid with dry paint, bags of this and bottles of that - not enough to use but too good to throw away."

"I love the definition of the verb "to potter" in my Chambers Dictionary - "to busy oneself in a desultory way; to dawdle."

Yes, one of the secrets of life is a good shed."

From the chapter..

Vanishing tools

"There are two distinct types of gardener. One goes outside and makes an amazing mess. Within minutes, weeds, tools, deadheads and buckets are scattered everywhere.

This is the type of who treats the flowerbed like a trampoline, trots down the path with muddy boots for a telephone call, doesn't bother to take the boots off at the back door, and finally sits down in the kitchen and demands a cup of tea. This mode of gardening is fine. I did just that. Then, when I realized how much good gardening time was wasted in cleaning up afterwards, I became the other sort of gardener. I tidy up as I go. How smug."

"Trowels can be worse. I like stainless - steel ones the best, but these are the first to go missing. Then I'm left with the ones to be avoided, which usually have jolly bright, coloured handles set at a peculiar angle to the digging bit of the trowel. The peculiar angel makes your hand ache to put any weight on them, and if you do manage to push them into the soil they go into terminal bend, from which they never recover. But you can't actually bring yourself to throw them away, so they hide at the back of the shed under some sacks until one day, when you've lost every other trowel in the place, you find a whole heap of them. But by then, you've forgotten that they're the bendy ones. Exasperation."