Spider wrote - lots of very interesting and useful stuff ...
-snip-

Hope this has been of some help.
Spider

'of some help' hardly begins to describe it - many thanks ....

(and to all the posters who have provided some excellent tips)

It is clear that I really need to get to grips with understanding what I
have - and what I want to do with it. I had aleady decided that I needed to
do something (in a small way) to help me decide which plants needed a lot of
water and which needed much less. The geraniums seem very tolerant of all my
attempts to drown them - and I am beginning to think I was very lucky to
have started there - initial success is always encouraging. It is a very
daunting prospect at this stage .... I have already counted 15 trees and
shrubs along the left hand side of the garden - and that is just a matter of
about 30 foot !! Of these I can identify only 4 - Eucalyptus, Fuschia,
Honeysuckle (which seems to be popping out everywhere) and Bindweed
(ditto) - oh and the Wild Rose - of the rest there are some very interesting
ones - The lovely white flowers which cascaded in bowed arches earlier in
the summer - which my aunt said was Hawthorn, but I think not (although the
flowers are similar), and the maroon/purpled-leaved shrub which I am sure
was green until a month ago ? - and the one that looks like holly (but I
cannot find the shrub - just the leaves popping out here and there). That
lot will take some sorting out - but at this stage I am content with just
some gentle trimming.

On the other side I have a blank space where we took out a 15ft high
Leylandia (?) hedge - which now contains a very feeble looking Jasmine
(Stephanius) which I bought at a car boot sale recently - my attempts to
grow some cover for the bare fence lack a little imagination at this stage
:-) - whereas my neghbours vigourous plants are marauding over the top of
the fence and laughing at me. The suggestion that I ask her how she does it
is not an option - I am forbidden from talking to her - as my wife
disapproves of her penchant for wearing one-piece bathing costumes i.e. the
bottom half :-) (can't see owt wrong with it myself - should have got rid of
the Leylandia years ago ) :-)

Anyway - enough of my digression - many thanks for all the help - I will
keep you posted of my progress if you like.

Oh - and for those who missed it - my mystery plant was identified by an
earlier poster as .... (errr I forget the latin name - but it has the common
name of Chamelion Plant) - designing databases was easy compared with this -
maybe I should come out of retirement and create a plant database :-)

regards Lol