THINK of clematis and you probably think of long swags of starry flowers and rampant foliage scrambling up trellises, or twining over metal arches, or running along walls and drainpipes.
But not in Bill Kavanagh's greenhouse: here, he grows dwarf clematis, each one smaller than the next the smallest an inch high mound in a tiny pot. "Fifteen years ago I scarcely would have known what a clematis was" he admits. Now, although there are at least 30 full size ones outside in the garden, it's the diminutive specimens he keeps under glass that enthrall him.
The tiny one is Clematis marmoraria, a meagre pile of feathery leaves; but it is Clematis x cartmanii Joe on which Bill has his hopes pinned at the moment. Joe is trained around a miniature hoop, and is heavily beaded with fat little apple green buds standing proud amongst the dark ferny leaves. If Joe can do its stuff and open its flowers by next week, Bill is going to show it at the big event of the year, next Saturday's Alpine Garden Society Show in Cabinteely, on the southern outskirts of Dublin.
Bill Kavanagh's infatuation with alpine plants has been sneaking up on him for about 10 years; but along the way he dallied with other types of gardening: "I started out with a basic lawn and a few floribunda roses, long since gone." Then he turned to herbaceous and bedding plants, and big shrubs that gradually swamped his modest garden. "I had to throw them out, they overgrew the place." Eventually he cottoned on toalpines: "They're much better suited to a small garden, they look well and they're very neat. They're little gems, if you like."
But you can never have just one or two little gems, you must have 10 or 20, and then 20 more, and then just another 20 or so until they number in the hundreds and thousands. Last year, Bill's alpines mounted an invasion on the greenhouse, a practical place that used to house sensible tomatoes and lettuces. Now it has been fitted with louvred windows and plunge beds, essential for these fussy little treasures. The windows allow plenty of air to circulate, and the plunge beds - a six inch layer of sand and grit into which the clay pots are sunk - keep the roots cool but not damp.
In the wild, most alpine plants - which grow high on mountainsides on thin, rocky soil - are covered by a thick, insulating blanket of snow all winter; keeping them snug and dry during their dormancy period. Obviously, Bill can't replicate that in our temperate climate, but he can shelter them from winter wind and rain in the glasshouse at the end of his garden. "I call them my snob plants - they're far too good to be outside. If you put the likes of that out," he cradles a Romulea bulbocodium, a petite bulb with mauve petals and a canary-yellow throat - "it would be battered and belted by the rain and the wind. It's too fragile to be out," he says with real tenderness. "It would only last a while."
Since he retired four years ago from Garda HQ, where he was in charge of the mapping department, Bill has had more time to spend grooming and preening and studying his alpines. Sometimes he disappears for days on end into the glasshouse: "In the springtime there is so much to do. I take off all the dead leaves and dead flowers. If you left them on they'd set off botrytis," a grey mould that can fell a delicate plant in days. "I clean off the whole lot of them - completely; and I re pot them if necessary.
Out in the garden, there are hardier alpines and rock plants: saxifrages with greyish rosettes of leaves topped by fuzzy crooks off pink and red flowers, leatheryleaved hepaticas with anemone like pink flowers, and difficult celmisias with grey hairy leaves and incongruous daisy like flowers renowned for dying off in stodgy ground. And there are ordinary garden plants too, bright polyanthus and daffodils, delicate primroses and haughty tulips: "All are welcome, all are grist to the mill."
One of the most precious plants in Bill's collection isn't anywhere - near flowering yet but it is imperative other gardeners know he has it. The very desirable and devilishly tricky Mutisia decurrens bears vivid orange sun ray blossoms in summer. "Mutisia decurrens, "he says with relish, the name rolling out of his mouth like pleasing, music. "Mutisia decurrens! Now that is a snob plant!"