Miracles do happen.

Trawling the internet we could find little hope for ailing tomato plant Clive after discovering it had been deliberately, indeed maliciously, poisoned by a couple of walnut trees.

Even reporter Tom Shaw, parodied here because he'd managed to do tomatocide on his own plants by giving them blight, found the goodness in his heart to wish for Clive's survival.

Basically, the advice on the web was "Bad luck, hounslowchronicle.co.uk, but your plant has had it once the leaves are turning yellow. Give up and next time don't thing it's a good idea to put a tomato plant under the evil branches of a walnut tree."

As you know, the walnut killers had been dripping a poison called juglone onto Clive and we'd been unintentionally helping it get to the plant's roots every time we watered our 'pet'.

Get ready for this. Clive is alive, if very skinny, after we went for 'kill or cure'.

First of all, it was put in an isolation ward, the back entrance foyer, for a week so was well out of reach of the walnut trees. They could 'sniff the air' but not pick up Clive. Then Clive was put on a starvation diet. No watering or feed so that the poison could not reach its roots so easily.

Either it would die from dehydration or find the will to live. One week on and we stripped away the dead areas to reveal not only a scrawny survivor..... but 38 little tomatoes ready for picking. What's more there are some tiny ones still appearing, so we've given Clive a drink, praying that the power of the poison is gone.