Gardeners disagree more about scent than anything else. Personally, I think the crushed leaves of Clerodendrum bungei smell quite disgusting; others say they are reminiscent of peanut butter. (It seems much depends on your taste in food.) Far better, in my view, to grow this plant - known as the Glory Bower - purely for its looks. Huge green, almost heart-shaped leaves are tinged purple, which echoes the large mounds of dark, rose-pink flowers. These open from purple buds at the end of summer and are a refreshing sight, though there won't be a great number of flowers in the early years, until the plants are at least chest high.
The overall result is a big shrub, more than 2 metres tall, which is not unlike the subtropical hibiscus. But you need space because the runners can pop up 5 or 6 metres from the parent and ultimately take over your garden. In practice, this means digging out the suckers or growing the plant in a corner where two walls meet, and restraining it at the front with either a well built path or a strip of rigid polythene about 50cm deep and sunk vertically into the ground, just as you would to restrict a running bamboo. The plant may then be chopped to the ground after a frost or, if it is quite sheltered, the winter may just damage shoot tips, which can be trimmed off along with some of the older shoots. They should really be treated just like hydrangeas. A hardier species, C. trichotomum, is bigger, almost tree-like and not quite as attractive, but the blue berries in November are amazing.
Winter will always have different effects on some plants from one year to the next, and the hardy plumbago Ceratostigma willmottianum starts producing deep blue flowers in July if the top growth made it through the previous winter. If it didn't, the flowers will only just be opening now. The leaves are beginning to take on the red and orange autumn colours and, if we get a mild autumn, the flowers will continue for some time until the temperature starts to dip and sucks the life out of them, making them pale and disappointing. The herbaceous species C. plumbaginoides will usually flower in early September and, once established, makes very good ground cover. The combination of intense blue flowers and red leaves goes well with the magenta of Fuchsia magellanica and, given the shelter of a wall, both could still be looking good when winter arrives.