This is one of the first plants I ever bought, about 20 years ago, in a tiny pot.

Now it is basically a small tree. It wants to bush back into a shrub but I have pruned it over the years to be a tree. I love it because it is beautiful. And partly because it won’t die easily – before I started tree-pruning it, I tried to dig it out and it just grew back; every year I hack huge swathes out of it and it just gets on with it. It is so full of life, that when I use sticks from it as supports for other plants, they start rooting.

And partly because it is a part of THIS garden. It grows out at an angle over the pond, so you couldn’t buy one and plant it like that. It can only be – and can only have grown up over time – where it is.

I also like it because it I once read an article in the FT by Robin Lane-Fox saying tree-pruned shrubs were INCREDIBLY fashionable – mostly for snobbish reasons about how long it takes to grow them – but it made me feel ON TREND.

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It is always covered in flowers and full of honey bees, that often bite through the tops of the flowers to cheat their way to nectar.

In the last couple of years, it has got fuchsia gall mite, probably from some cheap plants I got from B&Q to grow on for the school fair (which is galling ho-ho). This isn’t going to kill it, but it distorts the leaves and stops the flowers developing properly so that the plant ceases to be “viable”. I cut the infected bits off, and cut it right back in the winter – I read somewhere that very cold winters can kill the mite. So far this year, it looks alright and I”m hoping the cold winter/ spring/summer has delayed it for it a bit. I’ve also read that it gets worse through the summer, as successive generations breed and numbers grow. I think it is such a large plant it will probably be okay – you can chop it back for ages and there is still loads left, but I would be very, very sad if it ceased to be “viable”.