I was the first member of staff to arrive at work, and as I opened the gate I was greeted by the owners' son. He told me that last night they had reversed the horse lorry right up to the gate, so that you couldn't have opened it. A car (probably stolen) might be a match for the door of the gardeners' shed, but you wouldn't have much joy using one against the horse lorry, which is vast, ancient and shabby. The trouble with parking there on a regular basis is that the owner or the boss have to go out into the car park before the staff turn up just before eight, to move the horse lorry, so I can't see it lasting as a long term security measure. There is also the risk that the horse lorry will refuse to start one morning, as it quite often does, blocking the car park to customers for the day.
It is an odd thought that whoever stole the standard shrubs on Friday night must have cased the joint first, to find what they were looking for quickly and quietly in the dark. None of today's customers looked like thieves sizing us up, but how would we know what a thief looks like? A dodgy-looking bloke with tattoos in a hoodie? I read once of a small time American entrepreneur, who set out to sell donuts in corporate offices. There was only one of him, and many floors of offices, so he put a tray of donuts on each floor with an honesty box. His friends laughed at him and said it would never work as a business model. Because he knew how many donuts he had put out, and how much money was in the box, he knew floor by floor how many people were stealing donuts instead of paying for them. The loss rate was worse on the upper floors occupied by the more highly paid executive staff than on the lower ones where the less highly paid administrative underlings worked.
However, all of today's customers were very nice, and honestly didn't look like potential burglars. There was a solemn young couple interested in fruit trees, fairly new to gardening though experienced enough to have grasped that they had very heavy clay soil. They seemed genuinely interested in the theory of why adding organic material to soil improves it, but perhaps they were simply very polite. Another couple wanted to plant a hundred feet of yew hedging, and seemed grateful for advice on clearing the turf from the site (glyphosate it now for autumn planting. Unless you have a very strong ecological aversion to using glyphosate you do not want to volunteer to lift four hundred square feet of turf, and where are you going to stack it if you do? It is a horrible waste to put it in a skip). By the time we'd gone through planting distances for yew, speed of growth, constraints on the dimensions of a hedge (do not create one that is so wide at the top that you can't reach the middle to cut it) and mulches, they'd practically had a tutorial. The really rather posh owner of a famous garden in Cheshire was extremely charming, and after much agonising bought a pale cream banksia rose instead of the more commonly seen yellow pompom variety.
The pea hen had two chicks with her. Peachicks are like ducklings, in that they emerge from the egg with downy feathers, and can walk almost immediately. One of this pair is the usual mid brown, and the other a soft canary yellow, which makes me think it will be another white peacock, if it survives. The survival rate in peachicks doesn't seem very good. Of the five to hatch so far on the premises, one died immediately, one at a few days old, and one fell in the pond and drowned, while two made it to adulthood. The peahen is an assiduous mother, pecking small pieces of leaves off the plants, dropping them down in front of her babies, and pointing to them with her beak. I did have to shoo the three of them out of the shop at one point, and feared for a nasty moment there was going to be a peafowl stramash, because the automatic doors had closed behind her, and as I advanced on the door to get it to open, she began to panic, and stepped on one of the chicks. It bounced back, and they all ran down the ramp out of the shop, her clucking and the babies peeping.
When I got home I had to water all the pots in the Italian garden, the greenhouse and the conservatory, plus the dahlia bed because the dahlias had begun to droop, and I didn't want them aborting their flower buds at this stage. I didn't finish until a quarter to eight.
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