So that was Day One out of my three day stint at the plant centre. It was very humid, and rather grey most of the time, though I couldn't grumble about the lack of sunshine given that I'd left my hat at home, and if it had been a bright, scorching day I wouldn't have liked it. By quarter to eleven we'd only had about two customers, though it got busier later on. After the last lousy winter, and given the miserable state of the economy, we could so much do with some decent weather, just a few weeks of limpid autumn sunshine to put people in the mood to beautify their gardens.
My job for today, and indeed tomorrow and Monday, was to revamp the display tables. On Tuesday the owners are hosting a visit by fellow members of the HTA (Horticultural Trades Association) and they want the place to look its best. This is an industry self-help scheme, in which the owners of local garden centres go and look at each other's premises, and give constructive feedback. I suppose the idea is to raise standards across the industry, plant sellers of the Essex-Suffolk border unite against Jimmy's Farm, golf, the U3A, and all rival attractions for the spare time and spending power of the local population. It is rather a sweet idea. I don't think there was anything like it when I worked in the City. Instead of tidying up specially for the visit we should really let the HTA group see us in our normal state, then their feedback would be more relevant, but the owners' pride is at stake. Also, the manager is doing a lecture on bulbs on Wednesday and the tables might as well look nice for that.
There seemed to be something of a shortage of plant material with which to titivate the tables. I'm sure that in previous years we've had a collection of Hibiscus in full bloom which were useful for displays, and we could do with more flowering grasses. As I revisited potential sources of plants that I'd previously rejected as too shabby, in some sort of vain hope that they might have improved since the last time I looked at them, I was reminded of an episode from my first (psychology) degree. I took the child development paper (which illustrated the limitations of purely academic instruction, since I was not personally acquainted with any small children or babies at all, and at the end of it if you'd handed me one I couldn't have told you its age to within 18 months.) One famous experiment involved showing babies of different ages an object, then putting it behind a door while the infant watched, then secretly removing it. The children's reaction to this unexplained disappearance was supposed to allow the experimenter to infer whether or not the child had yet developed the concept of objects continuing to exist even when out of the infant's sight. I objected to the thesis of the experiment, on the grounds that when adults looked for their car keys in the same place they had looked twice already, we put this down to bad temper and didn't infer that the adults held incorrect beliefs about the spatial and temporal habits of car keys, and it seemed harsh to expect a six month old to display a more rational search pattern than a grownup. (The tutor disagreed. I don't think academic psychology and I were cut out for each other.)
Eric the rooster turned up OK last Monday evening after his altercation with the peacock. and was cock-a-doodling throughout the day. My colleagues both asked me if Eric had attacked me yet, but when I said no, why, had he attacked anybody else, it seemed that he hadn't. Eric was a giveaway rooster, one said darkly, and there was always a reason why roosters were given away. He had given away roosters himself. I thought one reason for needing to give away roosters was that you wanted several hens but only one cockerel, and in the normal way of things you'd probably get nearer half and half, hatching a clutch of eggs. As my other co-worker dislikes Berberis because it is prickly, I assume that on the same basis he distrusts any large bird with spurs.
One of them told me that the true reason for the water tank to have run dry seemed to be nothing to do with the tank not filling, but rather that the owner had emptied it to fill up one of the ponds. Apparently he did this again in the middle of the week, when the manager was there, and the manager discovered the tell-tale hose leading from the tank to the garden. So much for blaming the weekend staff for not keeping an eye on the tank.
As this is supposed to be a daily record it is really rather late to talk about last Monday, but I forgot to mention that the gardeners trimmed the yew hedges, and that we bag up the clippings and they are collected for use in making Tamoxifen. It's easy to assume that drugs nowadays are all sythesised in laboratories, and it's odd to think, as people take their dose of a cancer drug that could save their life, that the active ingredient started off in an Arts and Crafts garden in Suffolk, and one September day gardeners carefully gathered up their hedge trimmings.
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