History Is Being Made

I'm incuding a picture!
Because I have been holding forth on my lack of green fingers, I thought I'd give you all something different to ponder today.

This photo is piece of a shrub which decided to show its face in my garden. I believe it may have been trying to escape from next door neighbours, who'd abolished their own specimen... although possibly it simply sowed one of its own peacock coloured seeds on my side of the fence.

Be that as it may. Its rate of growth was prodigious, and for the first couple of years it provided a splash of life in what was then my barren back yard. Young leaves grew purple coloured, then turned to the green you see in the picture. If bruised, they smelled atrocious, but the white, starry flowers that appeared at the height of summer had an exquisite perfume, and the bracts and seeds were pretty in their own right, as you can see. I kept trimming lower shoots off the main stem, until it resembled a small tree, though I am sure it is actually a shrub, and set out on a long quest to discover its name.

Eventually, once I'd acquired a computer, thanks to the Internet I found the telephone number of a Nurseryman of some repute, according to his web pages. I rang, spoke to a minion(!) and asked for the boss. I was going to enquire whether I could post him a specimen for identification, but once I began describing my mystery shrub, he laughed. "I'm looking at one right now!" Talk about happenstance, eh? Of all the friends I'd asked, all the books and web sites I'd trawled through, the longest shot paid off fastest!

I can now tell you with absolute certainty it is a clerodendron trichotomum fargesii.
Aren't you glad I broke my 'no picture rule' just for that? What a mouthful!