There I was, standing in some glorious sunshine in late May, staring down a Purple Loosestrife that had developed ideas above its station. It was lunging skyward like a teenager who’d discovered protein shakes, all lanky stems. If left to its own devices, it was going to spend August collapsing into my pond like a drunk at a wedding.

So, I decided to deploy the ultimate horticultural weapon: the Chelsea Chop.

For the uninitiated, this is not a martial arts move performed by affluent Londoners. It is an act of calculated, mid-season violence. You take a perfectly healthy, thriving plant and hack it down by half. It feels entirely wrong. It feels like vandalising your own property. My neighbour watched from an upstairs window; I saw his face twist in horror at his unhinged neighbour’s act of plant aggression.

But gardeners must be ruthless. I chopped. The garden looked like a war zone, littered with severed greenery, and the Loosestrife looked utterly humiliated. It was just a collection of sad, stumped sticks bleeding sap into the soil. I went inside for a cup of tea, half-convinced I’d just murdered my favourite perennial.

And nature, it turns out, responds remarkably well to a good thrashing.

It has been a couple of weeks now, and the transformation is staggering. The panic is over. Instead of those pathetic, amputated stalks, the Loosestrife has mutated into an absolute beast. It panicked, realised it lacked the height to reach the light, and threw all its energy into lateral growth. It has bushed out spectacularly. It’s dense, it’s structurally magnificent, and it is absolutely raring to go. Come mid-summer, it will be a wall of purple fire, and it won’t need a single bamboo cane to hold its weight. So the Chelsea Chop works: it turns a leggy plant into a stronger, fuller one. Genius.