Every neighbourhood should have a woman just like Mrs Linders

She knew where every plant was hidden under the overgrown weeds, and had the Latin name for each. She had a particular hatred for a plant called a Veronica, a low-slung woody bush that would take over the world if you let it. Piles of uprooted Veronicas grew higher and higher.

When we moved, more than a year ago, I wondered what kind of neighbours we’d have. Nothing to worry about, I was told. The nearest person was a field away, and she was a widow named Mrs Linders with grown-up children. She’d had lung surgery, they said. But she was fine. I imagined a fragile little old lady with a whispery voice behind the windows of the green cottage at the curve of the road.

Fragile and little she turned out not to be. One day, this big smiling woman arrived accompanied by one big collie and surrounded at ankle level by a bunch of orange furball Pomeranians. Pomeranians have an opinion on everything, and bark it “Rack and ruin,” she said. “It’s gone to rack and ruin.”

Decades before, she and her late husband had laid out and taken care of the garden. She knew where every plant was hidden under the overgrown weeds, and had the Latin name for each of them. Maybe, we timidly suggested, she’d advise us?

The advice took the form of hard labour. She would arrive with the Pomeranians and attack a flowerbed or a rockery with a dogged energy fearful to watch, cigarette going the whole time. She had a particular hatred for a plant called a Veronica, a low-slung woody bush that would take over the world if you let it. Mrs Linders was not going to let it. Piles of uprooted Veronicas grew higher and higher.

I worried about someone the banks would describe as being in their Golden Years doing all this physical work, but when I talked to her daughters about it, they did a practiced shrug: Once our mother decides she’s doing something, she’s doing it and there’s no point arguing with her.

The garden began to recover from its wild state. As the seasons progressed, rolling banks of daffodils were replaced by purple daisies, carnations and — in mid-summer — by purple, blue and yellow flowers in neat disarray.

“If I planted them upside down, they’d still grow for me,” she said one day, briefly taking pleasure in their progress before getting enraged all over again about weeds and the fact that she couldn’t do anything about them on that particular Tuesday. She had to go home because a load of furniture was due to arrive. From a convent.

“Beautifully taken care of, convent furniture,” she told me.

I couldn’t imagine where she would find the space in the green cottage for more furniture. Any time I was in it, every surface was covered in freshly baked scones, apple tarts and soda bread. It turned out that the furniture was being stored out at the back of the cottage in preparation for a charity sale she holds annually. How sweet, I thought, to have a little sale in your back garden for a good cause each year. Then the container trucks began to arrive, and it was clear this was no little sale.

A week ago, the big banner signs went up, flapping in the sea-breeze but still readable: CHARITY SALE BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND, they announced, supported, just down the road, by another, slightly smaller sign, outside her son’s house. (Mrs Linders’ son’s house is always one to watch. He shares his sporting loyalties and seasonal enthusiasms. Whenever there’s a big match on, the bunting is broken out and a huge teddy-bear dressed in the Dublin colours is affixed to the pillar. At Christmas, EirGrid has to work overtime to fuel the lights on his outdoor crib and outsize angel.)

She still found time, last week, to weed half a mile of our pebbled driveway and give out to me for not calling her by her first name.

“Mary,” she told me. “You make me feel as if I’m a hundred, calling me Mrs Linders.”

When I dropped a crate of second-hand books at the cottage for the sale, the entrance was like an exit off the M50 on a bad evening. A constant stream of cars were lined up to hand over goods for sale with her directing operations like a five star general. Huge marquees had been erected in the field at the back. One was for furniture, one for Christmas goods (many of them new) one for books, one for household items (everything from microwaves to Waterford glass) and one small tent for bric-a-brac. It was like the Spring Show without animals, since, she announced, the Pomeranians were going to be locked indoors for their own safety for the weekend.

Appalled by the scale of the operation, I asked if they had enough help for the day. If they were stuck, I said, I could perhaps help out with the books? Mrs Linders patted me on the back with such kindly enthusiasm, she nearly stretched me face front into a carton of newly-arrived flip-flops, and made it clear she needed a gormless amateur like she needed a hole in the head. I might know books, she pointed out, but I knew nothing about pricing them or selling them.

One of her daughters, making the most of the sunshine in a bikini top and gauze skirt while sorting jewellery into trays, tried to make me feel better about this rejection. I was not to worry, she told me. They would have 60 experienced volunteers during the three days.

“Sixty?”

“My mother’s been doing this for years,” she nodded.

On Saturday, at least a dozen of those volunteers, garbed in brightly reflective protective gear the RSA would love them for, were out early, guiding arriving cars into a freshly-created car park. The sun blazed down on the bare shoulders of browsers. Strollers coming in off the cliff walk met early shoppers carrying worn-but-serviceable plastic bags filled with booty. Mid-afternoon, when the rains came, a bunch of volunteers protected incoming and outgoing visitors with big umbrellas. When gaps appeared in the offerings in any marquee, Mrs Linders would stump up and depute someone to go and collect new stuff from “the back” where it was protected by plastic sheeting.

As you read this, the third day of the sale is in full swing, and the organiser will soon know if she’s close to the enormous target sum she’s determined will go out to Rumania later in the week. If you’re anywhere near Portrane on Dublin’s Northside, take a detour, pick up a bargain. And meet an exceptional woman.

Throughout the year, and throughout the week, this half of this page tends to deal with the big policy issues and to attack or praise the household name politicians and businesspeople we all know.

But, because it’s a bank holiday, let’s celebrate a bossy elderly woman you’ve never heard of, who spends her entire life trying to improve other people’s lives and who can make anything in a garden grow. Every neighbourhood should have one …