HAVE a house plant that will be 50 years old in April. We used to call it —in fact we still do—but the RHS tells us that we should use the older name of ‘Purpurea’, which is almost as grim as its common name of purple spiderwort. It has thick, intensely purple leaves, rather like a dense and compact wandering sailor (which is what the botanists say it is). I was given it as a cutting from her garden by Norah Warre, a wonderful plant lover, then 94 years old, who lived at Villa Roquebrune near Menton. Warre said that Graham
