“You can’t have too many euphorbias,” someone said to me recently. I wouldn’t argue with that. Great structure, self-supporting, pest-free, often evergreen, a splendid grey or limey foil for other colours. OK, one or two of them run – Euphorbia griffithii, robbiae, cyparissias – but others are shrubs that never move an inch, and simply sit there looking classy and self-possessed.

One of these is Euphorbia mellifera – to translate, the ‘honey-bearer’, the honey spurge. Perfume is not something one associates with euphorbias but this one has a genuine, rich, honey scent.

A few years ago Euphorbia mellifera was regarded as tender and hardly grown. Now everyone is trying it and, given a warm corner away from cold winds and perhaps a wall nearby, it seems to sail through winters in both the north and south. It doesn’t last for ever, but then neither do we – ten years or so is not unusual.

It doesn’t look fabulous for sale in a pot, mind you; just a short, fat stem with a rosette of swept-back leaves on top. But once you get it in the ground it starts to shine. It will branch out, making a chunky, rounded shrub taller than you after a few years.

Like a rhododendron or a Daphniphyllum it carries its leaves on the “outside” of the plant in a carapace of rosettes: and they are green, not grey like Euphorbia characias’s.

The flowers, when they come in late spring, are arranged hydrangea-like all over the surface of the bush, open-textured crusts of yellow and green. There’s a touch of the elderflower fritter about them, but elder cannot compete for perfume with the honey spurge. Like elder and hydrangea flowers, they come in rounded pats – a surprise when many euphorbias have flower stems that unscroll like a fern. When the flowers are over, odd little fruits follow: green, like knobbly capers, and hard. Seed is in fact a good way of starting it off since cuttings are difficult. As ever with euphorbias, the latex sap can irritate some people’s skin, so be careful.

Where would I grow it? Well, clay is not its favourite home, but so long as the spot is hot it’s remarkably unfussy. As it clothes itself dome-like to the ground it would look good at the back of a gravel garden or pushing out over paving.

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