NEARLY 50 years ago, when Kitty Reardon was walking out with her young suitor, Liam, they rarely went to the pictures like other couples. No, instead "we'd go looking at all the lovely gardens around Herbert Park and Pembroke Road".
And when they got married, all she wanted was her own garden, "the biggest garden I could get". A newly-built row of houses in Finglas had just the thing. The end house had a long, narrow tract of land behind it and just over the wall, black-and-white cows grazed the green fields. "It was real country then," Kitty remembers.
Now, the cows are long gone, their place taken by busy roads and more houses. And sadly, Liam has gone too. Bib for many years he was Kitty's right-hand man in the garden, doing the heavy work and building special houses for particular plants. And when Kitty began her career as an exhibitor of vegetables, plants and flowers, he ferried her, her friends and their treasures from event to event.
And goodness, did Kitty win prizes. Awards for vegetables, lilies, fuchsias, pelargoniums, bulbs, cacti, flower arranging. The list goes on and on - as the sweetly-smiling, soft-spoken, gentle Tipperary woman carried off trophy after trophy. "I suppose I was kind of grabby, "she says, with thoughtful hindsight - and a sparkle in her eye.
Kitty still exhibits, mostly at the local St Brigid's Horticultural Society. And yes, she still carries off the prizes. This month she has been grooming her pelargoniums (which she sensibly calls geraniums) and fuchsias for their next outing. "You have one month!" she tells them sternly each day as she rotates them to achieve even growth.
But Kitty's garden is no laboratory for raising super-plants, it is a real plant-lover's haven, the accumulation of 47 years of serious - and amused and observan and awed - gardening. At one time or another Kitty has grown absolutely everything, from giant cauliflowers to hybrid tea roses, from apples and plums to daffodils and tulips, from herbaceous perennials to tender succulents.
Now, although she doesn't grow fruit or vegetables any more, she still tries to grow a bit of everything else - mostly crammed into, a few raised beds behind the house. It's all higgledy-piggledy, she laughs. "But I'm glad to have them all." And so dahlias and day lilies jostle with parsley and penstemon and every other plant you can think of - and each blank space is filled with a pot of succulents or fuchsias. More fuchsias (she is "reduced" to about 20 varieties) and geraniums (perhaps 60 varieties) live in a huge wooden greenhouse at the end of the garden. "They're all my old friends, she says warmly. And like old friends should be, they are cosseted and encouraged - and made to produce stout stems, strong leaves and indecently fat blossoms.
KITTY is also on warm terms with the wildlife in her garden. She is intimately acquainted with the business of the leaf cutting bee who lives in the scented-leaved geranium pot, with the wasps who get all romantic when they find a stripy Alstroemeria pulchella, with the butterflies who visit the hoheria and buddleia, and with the birds who congregate on the "great elbows and lumps of the cork screw hazel. She uses no sprays on the greenfly, letting instead heaving the hungry hoverflies to dispatch them naturally.
Only the slugs receive no mercy at Kitty's hands. But then, there always have to be losers where there is a winner.