Morwenna, munching her salad as thoroughly as though she was shredding compost, chewed this idea over too. ‘I suppose so,’ she said gloomily, and added, ‘but I’ve never been adaptable and I doubt if I can change now, so I also know I’m almost certainly going to lose my job even though I’m quite good at it. The readers want information. . . and I really do know about plants, so it seems a pity,’ she said sadly.

‘Why don’t you run a question and answer column instead?’ asked Christopher. ‘Then the readers could send you their burning queries and you could give them the crisp, factual answers they need. You could get your friends to bombard the paper with interesting queries – or even send the questions in yourself to start with,’ he suggested. ‘It might become unmissable monthly reading: Morwenna’s Mailbag – Your Monkey Puzzles Solved. You could sell the idea to your editor as a change of format for the magazine and then suggest he commissions nonhorticultural writers, local celebrities perhaps, to describe their dream gardens. That would supply the purple prose he needs each month – and you could then write helpful comments on the practicalities of their schemes. How’s that for a suggestion?’

Morwenna had looked at him out of her lugubrious brown eyes and said: ‘That’s not a bad idea. I might even give it a try,’ which Christopher imagined, coming from her, was a positively lyrical response.