EVERY morning, the buddleia outside my front door waves its exotic purple flowers at me on the wind, causing the butterflies gorging themselves on its nectar to cling on for dear life.

I hope it is a friendly wave, although I fear it is really sticking two frondlets up at me.

Buddleias come from mountainous places. The first, in the late 18th Century, came from Chile, although it wasn’t until French explorers found them growing on the China/Tibet border in the late 19th Century that a variant hardy enough for northern Europe was bred. This variety arrived in Britain in 1896, and it spread due to the railways – it found the stony ballast of the trackbed to the liking of its mountain-loving roots, and then it discovered that the movement of the trains helped its seeds to travel along the lines.

It is believed to have been named in honour of a British botanist, Adam Buddle, from East Anglia, who was a grass and moss expert who died in 1715 probably without ever having seen a buddleia.

By contrast, I have seen too much of my buddleia. In fact, I was pruning it late last year when it fought back, smacking me slap bang on the eyeball. From my point of view, it was very painful; from the plant’s point of view, it was a skilful manoeuvre as it had to move accurately to get beneath my glasses and quickly to get past my blink.

Every night when I fall asleep, the eyeball starts to repair itself, but it is like, when a schoolboy, you put long trousers over a cut on the knee and the two stick together. My eyeball seems to be fusing to the inside of my eyelid, and when I awake, I open my eyelid and rip off the repair, thus repeating the injury.

For months, I tried to work out why I had developed the stupid habit of poking myself in the eye as I awoke. Then I twigged. I’ve tried moisturising drops and night-time eye lubricant, all to no avail. After a personal best of three abrasions in one night, yesterday I had a large contact lens inserted, the purple-flowering menace waving me off as I went to my appointment with the ophthalmologist.

No buddleia gets the better of me. In the autumn, a large saw will see me triumph, with safety googles.

SPEAKING of shrubs, I was delighted by the England women’s cricket team’s success in the World Cup, and that the woman of the match was Anya Shrubsole. This was a new surname on me, and although Ms Shrubsole is from Bath, the Shrubsole family seems to originate from Kent. The last bit of the name, if you say it enough times, sounds like “hall”, and the first bit apparently comes from an Old English word “scrybb” meaning undergrowth. So it means something like “house near scrubby shrubs”, although the truth is no one really knows.

The other name that’s been bothering me this week is that of Owengate, the short, steep street in Durham City leading to Palace Green which is now closed on weekdays for repairs. It’s at the top of Saddler Street, where the saddlers worked, and just off it is Moneyer’s Garth where the bishop had his mint producing his money.

The best guess for Owengate is that it housed a medieval oven, but no one really knows. For those who like to have things explained, it is one in the eye.