I usually claim I don’t prune – and I don’t, if by pruning you mean that I regularly cut back plants for better fruiting or flowering every winter. But when the passionfruit that was the green curtain for my study window suddenly wilts – it is unusually elderly for a passionfruit – then I cut it back rather than look at dead stuff while I’m working.

The ginger lilies were crowding the white daphne and Bryan’s frog pond, so they had to be hacked back too. And then I noticed that the blue salvia is putting out new shoots and if I didn’t cut back the old ones now it would be almost impossible to separate vigorous new growth from tatty flowered, last-season stems. Once about two metres of salvia were gone I noticed the dead rose stems nibbled to extinction by the wallabies. And then the pomegranate called to me for a slight trim, just to make it easier to pass it on the way to the vegetable garden.

But the roses don’t need regular pruning to give massed blooms, as long as they keep putting out vigorous growth. I’ll trim the apple trees as they need it now and then in summer, when the wounds will heal faster. Unlike commercial orchards we don’t need to maximise our fruit production, or work towards bigger fruit. Dense foliage means the fruit ripens unevenly, which suits us well, and anyway the possums and wallabies nibble away nicely and the tangle of branches means safe nesting spots for birds. They’re going to miss the passionfruit.

Though it may yet recover when warm weather returns. Passionfruit are marginal here, so marginal it needs the reflected warmth of a stone wall to survive. Passionfruit are supposed to be shortlived too, but this one must be getting on for 15 years old. Today’s major surgery may be all it needs to rocket past the study window again. Or, perhaps, next spring I’ll be doing more pruning, saying farewell at last to a stubborn and generous fruiter.

* Making a mess, otherwise known as pruning;

* picking the first navel oranges of the season, frost sweet;

* glorying in the nerines, still blooming flagrant pink, week after week;

* harvesting a single blueberry and the green tomatoes that the bushes are still producing even if it isn’t warm enough for them to ripen except indoors. This season is weird;

* eating lots of Italian parsley, soft and winter sweet;

* browsing seed catalogues and dreaming of spring seedlings; and

* turning autumn leaves into summer mulch with a bit of raking