You need to buy the requisite number of those long, light plastic and reusable pots known as root trainers, which are not expensive and should be easily available at any good garden shop, and also a bag of retentive, soil-based John Innes No 1 compost, which will need to be lightened and opened up with an allpurpose compost and some horticultural sand or vermiculite.

If you use both the root trainers and the John Innes as above, and sow just one strong-looking seed to a pot, (though some people do sow two seeds to a pot to be sure and . . . rather wastefully . . .discard the weaker seedling when it emerges), then you need not prick out, pot on or disturb their roots in any way.

Simply leave them in the long pots which have ample room to accommodate the vigorous roots until it's time to plant them out in their flowering positions at the beginning of summer. The only work you have to do is watering (and don't overdo that) and pinching out the growing tip of each seedling when it's a couple of inches high, to make it bushy and strong, rather than spindly and weak.

Choose only the sweetestscented varieties of which there are now many back on the market, though none more gloriously fragrant than the unshowy but lovely little crimson and purple Cupani's Original, also known as Matucana, which is closest to the species and said to have been first cultivated by Brother Franciscus Cupani in the garden of his Sicilian monastery, whence he sent it to England in 1699.

Before that, in the 16th century, the Spanish are credited with bringing it to South America, where it became naturalised.