lavatera to lupinus

It's a mystery what makes people come out and shop for plants.  Yesterday was hectically busy, today dreadfully quiet.  There were a few light showers, but nothing more, and it's not as though there'd been a bad weather forecast to put people off.  There were no other major things going on, that I know of.  The A12 wasn't blocked.  I don't think it's been reported that scientists have discovered that gardening gives you cancer or Altzheimers.  But whatever the reason, they didn't come.  I'm not sure the cafe takings even covered the tea shop girl's wages, which is bad news for me, since the owner won't want her in tomorrow and I'll be stuck with teas.

The quiet gave me time to make some decent progress sweeping down most of a shrub bed.  I got from Lavatera to Lupinus, via Leptospermum, Lespedeza, Leucothoe, Leycesteria, Ligustrum and Lonicera.  The prize for the most derelict looking plant in a pot goes to Leycesteria, or pheasant berry.  Well grown in the garden this shrub is a delight, with smooth, glaucous green stems a little like bamboo, and pendant clusters of white flowers with red bracts, followed by red berries.  In a pot it forms a most wretched specimen.  The leaves scrunch up, then the small side shoots die back.  All I could do was pick off the worst of the brown leaves, since I didn't like to cut them right down without the manager's say so.  You are only supposed to remove a third of the stems at one go anyway.  I had one in my previous garden and cut it hard to the ground, thinking that I was doing the right thing.  It died.

The prize for the plant that's soddiest and most difficult to keep alive in a pot goes to Leptospermum.  They are bastards in pots, becoming root bound in no time.  If you over water them, they die, likewise if you under water them they die too.  Once planted they are not all that drought tolerant, despite coming mostly from Australia, which one thinks of as a hot, dry place.  I had one in the garden, which died to the ground a couple of times following droughts, only to shoot again from the roots.  Finally it died, the victim of a cold winter or one drought too many.  The fabled Manuka honey is gathered from the flowers of certain species of Leptospermum, though recent reports suggest that much of what is marketed as Manuka honey is in fact no such thing.

Lespedeza is nice.  It's a member of the pea family, which produces long arching shoots with mid green foliage that produce purple (rarely white) clusters of pea-like flowers in the autumn, and are generally killed by the winter.  Not to worry, clear them away as if it was a herbaceous plant and not a shrub, and it will start again in the spring.  You don't see Lespedeza very often, which is a shame, since they are very little trouble and burst forth into bloom at a useful time of year.  The RHS says that its one disadvantage is that it is late into leaf in the spring, but I can't say that has ever troubled me.

During my stints on the till I went through the list of plants we are supposed to be getting for customers, which were out of stock at the point when they asked.  I found several things that had been on the list for some months, and to judge from the appearance of the plants some of them had been in stock almost equally long.  I left some answerphone messages, but the customers I spoke to had all sourced the plants elsewhere in the meantime, though none were cross about being disturbed.  Other plants on the list I knew had come and gone since the customer left their details, without anyone making the connection.  The trouble is, there is no system for matching the list of wants to incoming stock, or to plants that we've potted up becoming rooted and ready for sale.  It depends on someone going through the list, and remembering that they've seen so-and-so in the plant centre, which is about as hit and miss as it sounds.  Though I was gratified to see yesterday that the owner has adopted my suggestion (made several months ago) that we should record voucher sales on pre-numbered sheets, so that it will not be possible for staff to re-use voucher numbers that have been allocated once already.