The labels weren't done for the Italian plants, so they stayed where they were on the grass at the back of the plant centre. Most of them are in quite hefty pots, so I didn't entirely mind not getting involved in moving them. Instead I priced up and put out for sale the things we got this morning out of the back of the weekly travelling van, which were much smaller.
I really like being allowed to go and have a look in the van. It visits garden centres between late winter and autumn, and is fitted with racks which are always stuffed with whatever is looking pretty at that moment, plus a slightly random selection of shrubs and climbers that can be useful for plugging gaps when we've run out of something. A few weeks ago it brought pots of snowdrops, miniature iris and winter aconites in bloom. Now it's got primroses and pulmonaria. It is such fun poking around the shelves, to see what they've got, like a visit to Santa's grotto for plantaholic grownups. We took strawberry plants, and little pots of garlic for those customers who neglected to plant their cloves back in the new year, and sweet pea seedlings, bleeding heart, white violets and lungwort. The manager passed on the trays of mixed buddleias because he had some coming in anyway. Then, after nearly nine years of working there, somebody finally showed me how to change the reel of labels in the price gun.
The tunnel over The Other Side is still crammed with plants that ought to be out for sale in the plant centre, and the manager was given the services of both gardeners for the day to help label them and tidy them up ready for sale. It's a busy time of year in the garden too, and I don't think the young gardener was best pleased to lose an entire day from what he regards as his real job, in order to spend it stapling labels on to plant pots. I was rather surprised not to be sent over to join them, but we were just busy enough that we needed two people in the plant centre all the time. The phones kept ringing with the usual mixture of people with sensible and straightforward questions, irritating callers, and the plain weird.
It took a long time for the penny to drop, after I'd explained several times to one woman that we had medium sized packets of micorrhizae in stock at £5.99, but not large ones, and that the large ones had been £10.99 but I couldn't remember exactly how many grammes the large ones held, that what she was after was for me to offer to sell her two medium sized packets for the price of one big one. Look, lady, if you want two medium sized packets then buy two packets. I partly blame lazy newspaper columnists for encouraging this vogue for people spending relatively small amounts of money to start demanding discounts from hourly paid staff, or worse still waste everybody's time by going round and round the houses instead of making it clear that they are asking for a discount. They don't go into Tesco and start asking the checkout staff if they can have two medium sized packets of steak for the price on one big one.
Another caller was completely unable to hear me. I kept repeating who we were more and more loudly and slowly, until I had to go out of the shop because it was too disruptive, and she kept repeating that she couldn't hear me, she couldn't hear me at all, while not saying who it was she wanted to speak to, or asking who she had run. This alternated between long silences and truly disgusting coughing. Eventually I hung up. If she was a genuine caller she needed to try again and hope for a better line, but she didn't.
On the bright side, some of the regular customers were back, including a tall and perpetually amiable garden designer who gets a very generous discount despite never spending much, mainly because he is so cheerful and rather good looking. He is also gay, so the boss needn't worry about the owner's generosity in the matter of discounts. And I steeled my nerves to ring people about plants they had ordered a very long time ago, and had taken that long to come into stock. A couple of people still wanted them, one had bought elsewhere but was awfully apologetic about letting us down, and the others were on answering machine. I should really have done yesterday afternoon, but you need to be feeling well rested and quite brazen to summon the nerve to call people to tell them that if they still want that rose they ordered a year ago, it is finally here.
Somebody rang to enquire whether we had his Berberis georgii yet. It would be very handy if only we could find some somewhere, as by now the list of customers looking for it runs to half an A4 page of an Excel spreadsheet. It had a glowing write-up in the Telegraph, ages ago, and today's would-be purchaser told me that there is a very fine one at Hyde Hall, which he and presumably some other customers had seen, but we can't find plants anywhere.
The cloud never lifted, despite optimistic weather forecasts first thing, and by mid afternoon it had got distinctly cold. I think it was a fog off the sea, as one customer told me that her son in London reported bright sunshine there. Driving home I heard there were hosepipe bans across swathes of southern and eastern England, as I feared there would be. That will not be good for trade. Looking when I got home at the map on the BBC website of exactly where the restrictions were, I saw that the Tendring Peninsular was still a little unrestricted island in a sea of bans, so I'm still OK in the garden at home. Passing the end of our wood I saw that the neighbours have had a delivery of some sort of compost dumped on our land. They have their septic tank on it, which happened before we bought the house, and we agreed that they could use the track to their tank for overflow parking. More recently they, or somebody, has been using the edge of the track as a compost heap. They denied all knowledge of this, but subsequently some branches of Magnolia grandiflora appeared in the heap at the same time that one vanished from their garden, so I don't think they were telling me the truth. Now they, or somebody, is using it to store bulk deliveries of soil improver. We are going to have to get on and fence the land off to stop the compost heap, and it would serve them right if we put a gate across the track at the same time, padlocked it, and didn't give them a key.
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