It’s hot, you’re tired, you’re hungry, and you spot a fruit tree. What could be nicer than a delicious piece of fruit? No wonder Jesus lost his temper when he came upon the fig tree bereft of figs and cursed it. The gardeners of Lambeth Palace have no such problems; the fig tree planted there in 1556 by Cardinal Reginald Pole, the last Catholic archbishop of Canterbury, is still thriving, and the gardeners are currently carrying out the latest of its five-yearly prunes, which have helped produce sizeable harvests over the years. So sturdy is the tree, which the cardinal is thought to have brought back from southern Italy, that Justin Welby took a cutting from it to Rome last year as a gift for Pope Francis. The Ficus carica, or White Marseilles, grows in a sheltered