POPULAR perception is that in order to be properly accepted as a grande dame of the garden, you must be wiry, grey haired and at least 75. Vera Huet is several decades short of such venerable age, but her gardening prowess and put her unequivocally amongst the ranks of the horticulturally blue blooded. "She is the one who will get up in the middle of the night to rescue a plant," one elder stateswoman says admiringly. And all agree that "I got it from Vera Huet" is the best pedigree any plant could have.
Her incomparable garden in Kilmacanogue, spectacularly ringed by the peaks of Carrigoona, Walker's Rock, the Sugar Loaf and Djouce, started as a bare, slanting field with just three features - two manhole covers and a septic tank. "I worked my way out from them," she says. "One plant would get company, and the garden just grew from there."
Oh, it grew all right. Early photographs show a few brave shrubs stranded in the great emptiness around the house. Now, 20 years on, there is so much rampant and varied plant life that the visitor is grateful for the odd bit of grass on which to rest the dizzy eye. But not only is Vera's sloping garden inhospitably dry and stony, it is also constantly whacked by furious winds that drive down from the mountains.
And because her water source is a well which is none too deep, watering must be done with buckets filled from rain butts under the eaves of the house.
The sensible gardener would grow short, wind resistant plants that require no water. But sensible gardening holds no appeal for Vera, especially since she likes her garden to be punctuated by tall plants: great, big, strapping things that, often, come a cropper in the gales.
There are foxgloves by the hundred: pretty white ones, soft peachy orange ones, and snazzy, maroon splashed ones that came from Fernhill Gardens years ago and have stuck around to bear more of their dashing progeny.
There are delphiniums, grown from seed obtained from the national collection in Yorkshire: their fat pillars decorated with blue blossom "just grew and grew in the wet May". And Verhascum homhycifrrum, the huge yellow flowered, woolly mullein has popped up all over the place and is just breaking its furry, knobby buds open.
And then there are the irises (more than 100 varieties) - just coming to an end, the spicy sweet dianthus (20 or 30 different ones) and the roses - their heavy, sensual scent sending the passing nose into a delirious spin. It is all the product of Vera's passions for various plant families. At one point it might be poppies that catch her fancy, or then she might fall in love with hydrangeas, or the umbellifers - that stately clan whose members include fennel, angelica, sea holly, coriander and cow parsley.
She's keen on off beat, browny colours: "I love the challenge of getting really muddy colours and seeing what I can put with them." And so the elastic bandage coloured rose, `Julia's Rose' is teamed with the orangey apricot verbascums, `Helen Johnson' and `Cotswold Beauty', with the brown foxglove Digitalls obscura and with the brown Sisyrinchium `Quaint and Queer'. Across the garden, the ordinary bronze fennel and the hybrid musk rose, `Buff Beauty' make a rich, handsome pair.
The already jammed accommodation must somehow take in the new seedlings that spring up all around the feet of their parents, for Vera welcomes enthusiastically any new plantlets that appear, particularly for interesting hybrids such as the dwarf toadflax that seems to be peculiar to her garden, and an elegant variegated alstroemeria with beautiful, clean markings on the leaves, unlike any she's seen before.