The dog had an entertaining start to the day. She was playing the rat game, rummaging around the office whimpering as if she had detected some rodent intruder, but each time the gardener lifted up the clutter at the place where she was looking nothing emerged, or scuttled away, and the dog went to whine somewhere else. I thought she was spoofing the boss, and he agreed.
My start to the day was less entertaining. I found some gentians that were going mouldy, which I deadheaded and cut back, as something useful to do while I was waiting for the manager to finish checking the emails and come and tell me what I should be doing. He marched up after a while and asked who had put the shrubs into the tunnel where the magnolias used to be. This was one of the things on his weekend list of things to do, and I had done it, so I said so. He said that they were going the wrong way, as he had wanted the alphabet going downhill away from the central aisle and not uphill towards it, and would I like to switch them all round. Thank you very much. It didn't say that in his instructions, and there is no logical reason why the alphabet should go one way or the other, given that in different parts of the nursery it goes both ways. I worked jolly hard over the weekend, labelling and moving a huge number of plants with a hand swollen to the size of a small potato that hurt every time I knocked the back of it on anything, and taking horsepill antibiotics that made me feel like crap. I said so, emphatically.
Afterwards I felt vaguely remorseful, but only vaguely. He is the manager. He must be paid a lot more than I am, and gets better terms and conditions, and for that he is supposed to supervise and motivate me, not start my week by moaning that instructions that only existed in his head hadn't been followed. Then I switched the pots around.
One of our regular customers came in, asking whether we could fit one of the trained espalier apple trees in her car. I suggested taking the empirical approach, and measuring the tree and the car to find out if it were theoretically possible. The tree turned out to be 48 inches wide and 67 inches tall including the pot (there's my cover blown. I have dutifully blogged all year in metric, but I think in feet and inches. Sorry. I can cook in metric but under stress can imagine 8oz better than 250g). The car turned out to be a Nissan Micra, and was 52 inches wide. A distance of 67 inches from the inside of the tailgate would put the top of the tree somewhere above the handbrake. I said that the tree would go in the car. The only slight difficulty was that the door of the Micra was several inches narrower than the width inside the boot, but the tree just slid in on the diagonal, after I'd cut off a bit of one of the supporting canes. It was protruding beyond the branch tied to it anyway, so she won't miss it. Whether and how she will ever get the tree out again at the other end is another question.
Somebody rang up asking if we had any Parrotia persica. After a little searching around I found some nice plants for a relatively modest price. It turned out that he was a tree officer, organising a memorial tree that somebody wanted to donate to a local park, and between them they had decided on a Persian ironwood. He was keen to have more exotic trees in the park, and pleased with the price because his donor was on a limited budget. I thought how unlikely, and how delightful, that in these cash strapped times a council still had a tree officer who was willing to work with members of the public, and put the time and effort into sourcing unusual trees. A colleague recently started a marketing initiative, sending out a list of rare woody plants we can currently supply to arboretums and large gardens, and I suggested the tree officer should add his name to it. I guess that you become a tree officer because you like trees, but you probably spend a lot of your working life after that dealing with ones that are suspected of becoming unsafe, or undermining foundations. Being allowed to plant new trees instead of delivering the fatal verdict on existing ones must make a nice change.
The electricians arrived to instal new lights in the central portion of the shop, which meant moving various tables of breakables so that they could get the scaffolding in. New lights were sorely needed. The old ones consisted of three gigantic bulbs in metal casings that always filled up with flies in summer, only intermittently all came on at the same time, and cast the same amount of depressing and insufficient light as energy saving lightbulbs do in the home. Putting up the new lights caused us little inconvenience, apart from the scaffolding and the noise of cordless drills and screwdrivers (marvellous inventions), but unfortunately by the time they were ready to connect the new lights to the mains and disconnect the old ones, which entailed switching off the lighting circuit for obvious reasons, it was already mid afternoon. The shop with no lights at all was extremely dark, and I think the electricians struggled to see what they were doing wiring up the new ones. I couldn't really see the till either, but by then there were very few customers. The shop illuminated by the new lights looked much more welcoming, and very, very bright.
The day's takings were pitifully small, though there will be some invoices to come for various deliveries. Maybe it is the economic apocalypse.
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