The owners were hosting a shoot today. I guessed this must be the case when I arrived at work, and most of the radio handsets were missing from the office. One member of staff who normally works on Saturdays was on holiday, so without the bosses to call on it looked as though the two of us who were on duty were going to be stretched. We did miss quite a few phone calls.
I was fairly sure I recognised one customer as Will Giles. He has a splendid garden in Norwich, which the Systems Administrator and I visited three years ago. Its last open day of 2011 is actually tomorrow. As I started to ring his plants up at the till I asked if he was Will Giles, and discovered he was indeed, so I told him that I'd visited his garden and liked it very much, and that I had his book. He seemed pleased. Some authors are just plain embarassed to be recognised. I once told Adrian Bloom I'd got his book and found it very useful, and he looked agonised. The Exotic Garden will be opening again next year, and the S.A. and I were saying the other day (or strictly speaking I was saying and the S.A. said 'yes') that we ought to go and look at it again. It is full of ginger lilies and bananas and all sorts of extraordinary tender plants, plus some very slinky little cats, and is easy to get to, being a short walk from Norwich railway station. While I had an exotic plant expert on the premises I thought I might as well pick his brains, and asked what he thought the chances were of getting my Norfolk Island Pine through the winter outside. He said that he had had one that got too big to go under cover, so he had planted it outside, and it had died. Oh well.
Somebody else returned a trolley load of plants that she had bought yesterday as part of a larger purchase. They weren't exactly what she had on her planting list but she had thought they might be acceptable substitutes. Her gardener disagreed, so she needed to bring them back. She had her original till receipt and the plants looked OK, so I had to give her a refund, which was a pity as it came to nearly 10% of yesterday's takings, and she had originally paid cash. I had to borrow £20 out of the other till (leaving a note for the owner to explain what I'd done) to find enough cash to make up the refund. Later on someone else bought a ten pound plant with a twenty pound note and I had to swop another tenner between tills, and my colleague had to go and hunt around the office to try and find some more float.
The garden shuts for the winter at the end of September, and a couple of disappointed would-be visitors asked why this was, one grumbling that she would have expected an arboretum to be open in autumn. I suggested that it might be partly down to the grass paths, to reduce wear on the grass and the risk of visitors slipping, given that one person had fallen in the garden and had then sued the owners. She huffed and departed dissatisfied. I have only moderate sympathy, in that the open period is clearly stated on our website and in the RHS handbook, and it is generally a good idea to check out opening times before visiting anywhere. True, I have been caught out myself several times over the years, but have only had myself to blame. Although I didn't say so to the frustrated garden visitors, I suppose one reason for closing the garden from October is that the shoot has started. The estate wraps round the garden, and if having a visitor break her ankle falling over was bad, winging one would be worse.
Late on a young couple came in, asking if we sold concrete tortoises. They had tried to ring us, but must have been one of the calls that with only two staff we didn't manage to answer. We don't sell any kind of concrete animal ornaments. I suggested the garden centre up the hill, but they'd already tried there. The only other place I could think of was in Clacton.
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