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'.Eryngium giganteum - this one I wrote about in the magazine but just wanted to show you what a fine and handsome corpse this plant makes. Still maintaining its shape long into the winter. It also looks great with grasses.

.However, this is not taking full advantage of the adaptability of this plant; it is a shrub that thrives on pruning. You hack a bit off and it will come back at you with ten new shoots. As a result it is easy to shape and can be used as a very effective architectural plant

should grow this tree (sorry if I'm sounding a bit bossy): its leaves are finely shaped (like a sort of muscular maple leaf); its bark is pale and slightly corky; it produces rather charming fruits called gumballs but, more than anything, its autumn

of its own? A good question: the answer is here.It will come as no surprise to know that parrotias are part of the same family as witchhazels, which have the same shaggy, sea anemone-shaped flowers. Witchazel flowers can be even more spectacular than

than Allium species. Then they send up tall slender stems (about 1.2m) topped with a tight bud, shaped like a torpedo. Over the next few weeks this bud gets fatter and fatter, while the membrane holding it in gets thinner and more papery. Some of you

that it is Parthenocissus tricuspidata, otherwise known as Boston Ivy. The leaves are a very distinctive three-lobed shape and are about 20cm long: we sometimes use them to cover plates (like brilliantly coloured doilies, but classier). Cheese in particular looks wonderful

stuff.If it rains or is too cold then you can always take refuge in the vast glasshouse and look at pineapples and vulgarly shaped dangling bananas. There was also a spectacularly flowered Sparmannia africana - if you have a big conservatory

Showers', a shorter variety, with almost starry shaped flowers.Philadelphus tomentosus, another large one, but it will take more shade than many.If they get a bit unruly then prune them all directly after flowering.June smells like philadelphus.

and bumps will make them adopt unnecessarily distorted shapes. Oh, and don't add too much manure, as that will make them fork. The roots are best harvested after the frost has been, as the cold tends to make them much sweeter and more delicious.My wife

size, the right shape and then a lot of swearing as somehow this thing was roped onto the top of my car and hauled back home. Even then all was not yet rosy - on one occasion a closer inspection of the tree revealed that there were far fewer branches