It’s not easy gardening ‘a deux’. You either ruthlessly get your way and feel horribly guilty, or you give way gracefully and constantly cringe at the result. Or worse still you compromise. Then no one’s happy. Margery Fish, who died in 1968, was a trendsetting cottage gardener who planted East Lambrook Manor in Somerset. She was happy to plant a soft swathe of cottage garden perennials and she popularised hardy geraniums, pulmonarias and astrantias, among much else. She also wrote A Flower for Every Day, which is still a great inspiration to me.

Her husband Walter Fish (who had previously been her boss when editor of The Daily Mail) demanded structure and order. Several of her books contain an undercurrent of disharmony if you read between the lines. Walter insisted on planting the Pudding Trees, a line of long-gone small conifers, for structure. Years later Margery conceded that they gave the garden structure in winter.

So when I moved here I decided structure was key and I decided to plant small box trees and shape them into balls. In winter these neatly clipped orbs would shine through a neat, bare border. I planted small for two reasons – Yorkshire thrift and box blight. Box blight (Cylindrocladium buxicola) makes the growth twiggy and bare. This relatively new fungal disease is often seen in old box hedges and lots of gardeners have had to remove hedging amid tears This airborne fungus is spread by water droplets borne in the wind. However, the spores are sticky. Garden shears and mechanical clippers can and do spread the disease as they go.

I went for small box plants that had hopefully been in a muggy tunnel for as short a time as possible. However, having taken this ‘small and cheap’ stance, I then went and wrecked it by buying two mature box chickens – price withheld for family harmony. So far they appear healthy as they enter their fourth year. Yorkshire thrift must have been absent that day.

Whenever I clip box (usually in early June and September) I take precautions. I wash the clippers between plants and I spend a lot of time rubbing out the clippings. This keeps the topiary a fresh green, rather than a confection of speckled brown and green, hopefully lessening the chance of fungal diseases.

My box balls are growing healthily. But they have still only reached six inches in width! I should have used three plants per ball and trained them together and then I might have had a ball 18 inches wide or more. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

But I have also failed on a further count. I wanted my four box-balled rose and peony beds to look immaculately crisp throughout winter. They don’t because I have planted penstemons and gauras. You can’t cut them down until late March so they get progressively more ragged. Look up the path on a winter’s day and all you see are half-dead relics.

So the penstemons and gauras are coming out along with leggy lavenders, anthemis, and ballotas. The hope is that one day I will come up the garden path on a crisp winter’s day and spot gleaming box balls with no distractions. Walter Fish would be proud of me. I’m not so sure about Margery though.