The boss was in a grumpy mood when I arrived at work, not helped by the fact that the manager rang in just before eight to say that his back had locked up in the night, and he might or might not be in later if it would unlock sufficiently for him to drive. The dog rolled over and showed me her tummy to be rubbed, but the boss gloomily observed that she was not such a good dog as her mother had been. The owner asked whether I needed the woman who works on The Other Side on Mondays to help with the watering, and I replied that I would be OK, as most things had looked pretty damp last night and I didn't think there'd be much watering to do.
The manager made it in by nine, limping. He went on a two day management course run by the Horticultural Trades Association a couple of weeks ago, but the section on leadership can't have included remembering to ask your staff whether they had a nice holiday. After a while his loyal assistant came and asked me why I had not asked Margaret to help with the watering. I replied that most things were wet enough already. She warned me darkly that it was going to be hot, and that she was going to water the fruit as it always got dry. At least the dog was pleased to see me.
After that things were pretty quiet, and I got remarkably little done compared to yesterday, because I kept finding myself hanging around the shop. Someone has to be ready to accept customers' money, and act as a vaguely deterring presence to shoplifting, and it is impossible to do so from the vantage of half way down the shrub beds while you tidy up the Escallonia, which arrive from the suppliers looking lovely, then go rapidly downhill. They seem to turn spindly and starved in no time, drop half their leaves, and generally look dire. They are easy going plants in the garden, but if you want a nice evergreen for a pot, don't choose an Escallonia.
One of our major suppliers for that sort of thing will not be able to provide any Daphne bholua 'Jacqueline Postill' this autumn. They did not actually do their own propagation, but bought in liners, the horticultural trade term for young rooted plants, from an even smaller firm, and grew them on into saleable sized shrubs. The proprietor of the firm supplying them is gravely ill, and the supply of liners has dried up. Customers sometimes get stroppy with us (occasionally very stroppy) when we don't have things in stock that we are listed as stocking in the Plantfinder, and can't order them in within a couple of weeks. I don't think many people realise quite how small and precarious the supply chain is for many garden plants.
It is about to get even smaller if the European Commission has its way, according to recent reports in the Telegraph. A proposal is allegedly afoot to require all ornamental plants for sale to be entered on an official register, where their characteristics would be described in botanical detail, at a cost of around five hundred pounds a time. This is a bad idea in so many ways, I can't be bothered to start. You can think of them for yourself, or read Michael Leapman's views on the subject. It's stuff like that which has turned me from an enthusiastic Europhile into a muttering sceptic.
It wasn't hot.
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