creosote (substitute)

There was no frost last night.  I feel like a general fighting the last war, to have put the heaters on because there was a frost the previous night.  At least I remembered to switch them off this morning before leaving for work.

The smell of creosote substitute hung over the plant centre and permeated everything.  Occasionally I thought I detected a faint whiff of Sarcococca, but it was mostly creosote.  The herbaceous tables were dry enough for me to start replacing the pots that had been cleared off them so that they could be painted, so I cleaned up and moved Hemerocallis and iris, breathing the chemical stink as I did so.  I presume that creosote substitute is not so noxious as the real thing, which was pretty potent, and incidentally very toxic to cats.

The fuel for the tunnel heater is stored in an old container labelled - what else - 'creosote', which caused my colleagues a certain amount of head scratching as they set out to refill the heater.  They did put the right stuff in the tank.  There were three people working on painting the tables on Friday, and there are still five big containers of creosote substitute left in the pot shed.  When they're finished I guess that will be it for this year.

One of our customers today turned out to be a true, dedicated (not to say fanatical) gardener.  She bought a trolley full of shrubs and trees, which she seemed very pleased with, and it turned out that today was a red-letter day for her, and she was going out afterwards for a special lunch to celebrate.  She moved down here from Edinburgh, where she had a walled garden with perfect soil, and had spend four years struggling with her new garden, where nothing would grow.  She ended up removing vast quantities of builders' rubble and barrowing in twenty tonnes of topsoil.  Finally, she was ready to start planting.  Today's purchases were the first of the structural elements (although I did notice one hellebore had sneaked into her trolley) and as she departed, beaming, she promised that she Would Be Back.  It sounded like a long haul, and I gather there were some difficulties regarding access, and the neighbours.

The Systems Administrator suggested yesterday evening that maybe customers in January tended to be nice because the only people who come in at this time of year are the keen and knowledgeable ones.  Not so today.  (It is a good rule of thumb that when you greet anybody with a cheerful 'good morning' in the hour between noon and one o'clock, which still feels like morning if you have not yet had lunch, and they reply 'or afternoon', the conversation is unlikely to go well after that, because you are dealing with a picky so-and-so).  Today's pernickety old lady, pleasantries brushed aside, advanced on the till with a plastic bag containing a shrub, and announced that she had bought it a year ago and wasn't happy with it.  The shrub was a Spiraea, still with our label on it.  I asked what was wrong with it, and she said that it had never done anything.  I asked if the leaves had emerged normally, and she said that it had leaves and flowers on when she bought it.  She rummaged around in her purse for her receipt, and was surprised to find that she had bought it in July, and not a year ago.  You wouldn't expect to buy a Spiraea in full bloom in January.  I inspected the roots in the plastic bag, which looked absolutely fine.  Quite good, actually, as they had started to move beyond the confines of the original pot.  I scraped at a stem with my fingernail and, as I expected, there was green underneath.  I suggested as gently as I could that it was alive, and was in fact perfectly healthy, but she reiterated that she didn't like the look of it, and that her family hadn't liked it either.  I explained that as Spiraea were deciduous that was what they looked like in January, then played the 'weekend staff aren't allowed to give refunds' card, and we agreed that she would leave the plant with me so that the manager could look at it in the morning.

The owners' son rang up from his boarding school grumbling that he was bored.  I tried to be sympathetic, but really he ought to have been grateful that nobody was making him go for a cross-country run, or any of the hearty stuff they do at boarding schools.  After all, he could have been breathing creosote fumes and talking nicely to idiots.