Here’s something to strike fear into your heart: first box blight laid waste to our clipped hedge topiaries, then it was sudden oak death threatening the most English tree of them all. Now that stalwart of the English garden, the fuchsia, is under threat from a new bug, the fuchsia gall Mite.

It’s been spotted in Hampshire and causes twisted, distorted growth at the end of fuchsia shoots and branches. Let’s hope it doesn’t get much further – fuchsias may not be my favourite plant, but they’re good-looking, dead easy to look after, I grow lots of them in various gardens and we’d all be poorer without them.