SPOTLIGHT ON... Valentine’s Day

If you’re fed up with predictable chocolates, cut flowers or champers, why not give a “green” gift with a message? Who knows where it might lead? A trip to the nursery if nothing else.

A good many plants have romantic common names.

You could opt for bleeding heart (Dicentra spectabilis), pictured above, or love grass (Clytostoma callistegioides) and love-in-idleness

(Viola tricolor), better known as heartsease, which is almost as good.

There’s passionflower (Passiflora caerulea), a fast, clingy beauty, or how about lovage (Levisticum officinale), a tall yellow-flowered cow parsley-type herb that’s said to cure smelly feet. Now there’s romance for you.

And don’t forget lad’s love (Artemisia absinthium), a vital ingredient of absinthe liqueur, once intended for medicinal purposes but nowadays used for after-dinner application.

You might settle for seeds of annual love-in-a-puff if you can overlook the less-romantic Latin name, Cardiospermum halicacabum.

Or there are love apples, which won an undeserved reputation as aphrodisiacs due to a slight error in translation centuries ago – nowadays we know them better as tomatoes.

To drive home your message, you could consider investing in a plant bearing the same name as your loved one.

That’s easily done if her name happens to be Lily, Dahlia, Marigold, Hyacinth, Rose, Myrtle, Olive,

Daphne or Violet. Or there’s basil and sweet William. Although what would you make of a ragged Robin?

When it comes to suitable names the Plant Finder book is packed with subjects or look online at rhs.org. uk/about-us/what-we-do/publications/plant-finder