I didn't recognise June Rodgers without her freckles on. Big, bean-sized freckles that have been the comedienne's trademark make-up in so many pantos at the Gaiety Theatre. An incongruously normal-looking person in jeans and sweat-shirt opens the door to the granite cottage in Firhouse, Tallaght. Or is it Templeogue? "It's always been Tallaght to me," she says matter-of-factly.
Only the glitzy, over-the-top outfits hanging in the tiny hallway give her profession away. After six years, she has waved goodbye to the Gaiety, and is in concentrated rehearsal for The June Rodgers Summer Show at the Red Cow Moran's Hotel, off the Naas Road. The revue starts next week, so I'm lucky to get this chance to see her in her off-duty mode. Rodgers is a mad-keen gardener: "People think it's odd that I'm into the garden. They think that because you're a comic, you should be into drugs or something."
Her father was a good gardener, and their home in old Tallaght village - "with the graveyard on one side and the police station on the other" - had a glasshouse and a big vegetable garden. "He grew marrows and beetroot and anything else you could think of," she remembers. "Anyone who called there never went home empty-handed. They always left with a bag of something." After a move to Brittas, and the untimely death of her mother, she and her father bought the 1903-built stone cottage, with just "a toilet in the back garden and a tap in the front" - and a glorious view of the Dublin mountains. "He worked till midnight doing the place up ."
But he never lived there. "He died suddenly, before he moved in." After his death - "and I could never sell the house now" - Rodgers found herself in sole charge of a sizable garden that had not been touched for nine years. Monstrous growth covered the good, fertile soil. "I didn't know a thing about gardening, but I had to do something."
So, she hired a man with both a JCB and a tractor with a rotavator to level the back garden and sow grass seed. "I built a rockery with the granite from the toilet, and the first year all I had in it was alison and lobelia." The gardening bug soon had her in its grasp. "I'd go to friends' houses and take a slip of this and a slip of that. I had great crack because everything grew!" she marvels.
Now, some 10 years later, Peter's (her husband of three years) and her back garden is a busy place with overflowing borders and beds, a vegetable patch and two bergenia-edged ponds for tadpoles and bird-bathing - "I think they're too small now: they look like basins!" A large lawn is strewn with strange knobbly toys, bouncy balls, knotted ropes and rubber bones - playthings for their two slobbery labradors, the honey-coloured Jessie and the sable-black Polly.
The garden is a tribute to all those who have parted with cuttings or seedlings, or advice. Each plant comes with a description of its donor: "Our friend, Michael Grey - he's mad into gardening - gave me those aquilegias which he grew from a seed-pod," and "a man gave me that acanthus in a big bucket," and "those clumps of pampas grass were from outside my sister's mobile home in Brittas".
Rodgers doesn't have much time for Latin names - her plants grow well enough without their lofty botanical handles. A blue-green-leaved, low shrub with yellow flowers is thriving in a warm spot in front of a sprawl of honeysuckle grown from four "slippings". "Peter's dad gave me that," she says fondly. "Coronilla glauca, I think," I inform her importantly. "Coronilla who?" she slaps out in her best stage-Dublin accent, putting me nicely in my place for mouthing off in Latin.
She has planted the roadside - where loud traffic whizzes by - with cheery, orange-flowered montbretia: "I was mad into montbretia at one stage, as we all were!" Inside the front gate is a full-blown border of cottagey plants, with a special, old-world air about them. "A friend came in here one day, and she said, `You know, you have a real Protestant's garden!' And I said `What is a Protestant's garden?' I am a Protestant, but I still don't know what she means."
Well, just for the record, here's what the Protestant's garden looks like: an exuberant congregation of plants all running into and around each other, happy in themselves, and with one and other - and not an inch of bare soil showing. White-flowered snow-in-summer tumbles around pink oxalis, hardy geranium, pink-spired knotweed and South African daisies. Yellow lilies and loosestrife stand high above the sprawlers and crawlers, while a procession of red hot pokers brings up in the rear. A clump of stately, ecclesiastical-purple, bearded iris has pride of place - these are cherished plants. "They came from our old house in Tallaght. My father gave them to my aunt who lives down the road, and she gave them back to me," says Rodgers. "It's nice to have something belonging to him."
Jane Powers can be contacted at: jpowers@irish-times.ie