When I got to work there was an impressive, large, new padlock on the gate. I didn't know the combination number, and had to wait until someone else arrived who did. I suppose the boss has come round to the idea. His initial response after the second burglary was that he did not want a padlock, it was pointless because they would just cut through the chain, or else smash the gate off its hinges. I suppose they might, but all these things take time, and make you look quite suspicious, in full view of the road. Our experience trying to cut through anchor chains with bolt croppers for entirely legitimate purposes is that it is not a quick or easy job, and we had very good quality bolt croppers, not for cutting chains, but for cutting loose the rigging, if the mast had ever come down at sea and we had needed to cut the wreckage free in a hurry before it could smash a hole in the hull.
It drizzled all morning, except when it rained. The main task that the manager really wanted us to do was to sweep through and tidy the shrub beds. In the brief gaps between showers I managed to get approximately three quarters of the way down one bed. I counted them and there are fifteen in total, which leaves some way to go. In the afternoon it rained a lot, though it seemed to be foggy at the same time, and the air felt as though I was breathing soup. I dreaded to think what effect it was having on the Systems Administrator, who really does not do humidity at all well, especially when combined with the requirement for either movement or thought.
We weren't as busy as we might have been if it hadn't been simultaneously foggy and raining, but there was a steady trickle of customers. One, a man at the older end of middle age wearing a stockman's coat and leather hat, said he wanted some information, though he was a complete townie, more used to concrete. He had a slightly ponderous manner that put me in mind of Geoffrey Whitehead in character as master of an Oxford college (who turns out to be a murderer). He said he wanted to know about trees. This was music to my ears, as a tree lover. Townies who have seen the light and now wish to plant trees are to be applauded. I explained that he would find trees in two places in the plant centre, rare trees at the back of the shop, which were all fairly small the the moment, and larger specimens on the far side of the plant centre,tied to racks so that they could not blow over.
My customer did not wish to come outside and look at the rare trees, on the basis that his tea would get cold. I thought that since he was standing talking to me rather than sitting with his wife drinking his tea, it was getting cold anyway, but that was up to him. He said that he had been thinking of planting something called Prunus autumnalis, and I said that was a variety we listed, though I didn't know if we had any currently, but that he would find them with the larger specimens. He asked whether prunus were not rare, and I began to sense that I was talking to someone who had started doing research on the basis of such profound ignorance that they didn't understand the import of what they had read.
He wanted to buy his trees small and bare root. Again, his researches were correct, in that many woody plants transplant better as small specimens, and bare root can be better than planting out things with spiralling roots from life spent in a pot. I had to explain that the commercial reality was that most trees were only available as container grown plants, and often only as larger ones, because the majority of customers wanted something they could see in their garden, now. His complaint against planting older and larger trees turned out not to be concerned with their root structure and how easily they would transplant, as because he disliked the way that the lower branches had been cut off the main stem, leaving ugly marks. I had to explain that even if one planted a small, young tree, it would naturally tend to produce branches low down, which would have to be cut off as it grew, or else would be shaded out in time by the crown developing above them. He seemed to have visions of a tree shooting up to six or eight feet before branching out, then sprouting a full head of branches at the top of a perfectly straight and unmarked trunk, without any human intervention.
Then he wanted to know about his rose hedge. He had planted a hedge of 'Roseraie de l'Hay', which is a popular, well-regarded double rose in the Rugosa group. It had grown very well, and got too large for him. Not knowing how to prune it, he had removed it entirely, gone to all the trouble of replacing the soil, and replanted with fresh 'Roseraie de l'Hay', most of which had thrown out stems with small, miserable white flowers on it. He had heard that roses were sometimes grown on other roots. Could it be that these roots had sent up stems. I agreed that was extremely likely. He was not happy with the idea of grafted roses, and did not see why an old English variety like 'Roseraie de l'Hay' had to be grafted, since if it had been around for a long time it ought to be able to manage without. I did not follow his logic, and as it happens (and you might guess from the name) 'Roseraie de l'Hay' is not an old English rose, but a French one dating from the very early twentieth century. All I could do was tell him that while roses would strike from cuttings, and that was how amateur gardeners generally made more, propagation on a commercial scale was almost entirely by grafting.
He was worried about a red thing he had found on his one plant that did have red flowers, a red thing the size of a tomato, and was afraid it might be some disease. I said that roses in the Rugosa group did have large round hips, though I couldn't think offhand exactly what those on 'Roseraie d l'Hay' looked like, since I didn't grow it myself, and in the plant centre we tended to cut them back after flowering so lost the hips. He sent his wife to the car to fetch the large red thing, while he went to look at trees. I nipped off to get our David Austin book of old and shrub roses, and she came back with a perfect hip, glossy and shining, still with the withered remains of the petals on it. I confirmed it was a hip, and produced the photograph in the book as corroborative evidence. She denied having ever seen a flower, but was convinced by the photograph.
I felt quite drained by the end of it, as though I had been trying to communicate with members of an alien species. Ignorance of names, or specific facts, or techniques, is entirely understandable, but how can people, even townies, have so completely lost any empathy with living plants that they they will grub out an entire hedge rather than find out how to prune it, and mistake a fruit for a diseased growth?
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