LONG YEARS ago, when the world was young, I trained as a horticulturist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. My social life wasn’t much to speak of, since I lived at the other end of the day from my university friends and I was always chronically short of money, so I would volunteer for as much overtime as I could get. What I most vividly remember was doing ‘weekend duty’ in the Palm House.
Early on a
