This morning brought another sign that winter is fast approaching, since it was the last visit this year of the van that calls weekly at the plant centre, bringing trays of little things in flower. Through the autumn it has been pansies and violas, cyclamen and primroses, heucheras, and occasional climbers in impossibly tiny pots. If you visit several plant nurseries in the eastern counties in rapid succession and have a faint sense of deja vu that you have seen flowers just like that already in your trip, you probably have. However, the van won't be back now until the early spring, when it will be time for miniature iris, pots of snowdrops, and winter aconites. The van does stock ornamental cabbages as well, but the boss and manager don't think that our kind of customer goes for those. The flying dutchman whose lorry comes on Fridays with supplies of generally rather gaudy shrubs made his final call of the year last week. Winter's grip is tightening.
That being the case, my first job of the day was to round up all the heucheras that were scattered around the plant centre and put them together on one table under cover, to protect them from the worst of the weather. There were a great many heucheras lurking in the ornamental displays, as well as in the herbaceous section, and every time I thought I'd got them all I found another. They would not all fit on the original table, and some had to go on to a second, overspill table near the shop, where at least they could be covered with some fleece or quickly put into a trolley and wheeled to somewhere with more protection if the weather got too bad.
I have become disillusioned with heuchera, and no longer grow them at home. Plant breeders have developed a vast number of varieties in recent years, and they look very pretty in their pots, in a fussy way, when they are new. They rapidly look less pretty, are particularly prone to vine weevil attack, and in the garden require frequent division and replanting into improved soil, otherwise they dwindle and die. They are rather prone to dwindling and dying as well in pots in the nursery over the winter. Heuchera are not plants that you can leave to happily and usefully get on with life, and I have no time for them nowadays. But they are very popular. They need to be, the number we have left this late in the season. When I go around village Open Gardens I play the game of Spot the Heuchera, because owners resort to them when trying to smarten up prominent corners in their borders.
I discovered that the beekeeper who has colonies in the garden and on the farm had said nice things to the boss about my talk on bee friendly plants, which was good of him, and that the organiser of last week's talk on seasonal planting had said good things about it to the manager, which was nice of her. In these hard times it is no bad thing for one's employers to be reminded by third parties what a talented and competent individual they have the good fortune to number among their staff.
A couple wanted to buy a birch as a memorial tree. They told me they had had a conversation over the weekend with a young man who was ever so nice and helpful, though they could only remember the first letter of his name. I think they would have liked to speak to him again, but he doesn't work on Mondays, and it took some time to coax them away from the subject of their previous conversation, which I hadn't been party to and was in no position to reproduce, and on to the subject of birch trees. Once they'd stopped pining for their previous sales contact and begun to tell me what it was that they wanted and how I could help them we got on quite well.
I returned from the birch trees to find the man from the cafe obligingly putting a couple of herbaceous plants through our till for somebody. I am sure he means well but I don't think he should be doing that. If there's a till error today I want to know that it was definitely down to me or the manager, not that it might have been a third party who doesn't even work for the owners. I mentioned to the manager at the end of the day that the cafe chap had been operating our till, and he groaned, although he is not so fanatical about who uses the tills as I am. It turns out that on Friday he didn't see initially why I hadn't just paid for the three plants I sold at my talk, while I was there, until another member of staff who used to work for Nottcutts and has been drilled in procedures and security more than we have pointed out that it wasn't appropriate for me to touch the tills on a day when I wasn't officially working. After all, they wouldn't want to be blamed for my mistakes.
Although the clocks changed yesterday, we don't switch to a four o'clock finish until the end of the month, so for the last twenty minutes we were all wandering about more or less in the dark.
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