escape to paradise?

It isn't just the customers who would rather be anywhere but here.  On my desk are the January issues of the three monthly gardening magazines I subscribe to.  'Escape to Paradise' is the lead story on the cover of Gardens Illustrated above a photograph of allliums and oriental poppies in a hazy golden light.  'Eight gorgeous gardens to start the year' promises The English Garden atop a picture of a rowing boat on a pond surrounded by flowering hydrangeas.  Whenever the year starts it obviously isn't in January.  Only the RHS Garden magazine doggedly offers 'Winter Garden Delight' with a picture of "a topiary centrepiece glowing in the watery light of winter at Cantax House, Wiltshire'.  I can see that a magazine editor, faced with yet another year of mustering enthusiasm for coloured and peeling bark, clipped evergreens and snowdrops might decide that they or their readers couldn't face it and that pretending it was May or July would be easier, but since the watery light of winter is mostly what we've got at the moment we might as well try and make the most of it.

I may have been too hard on our customers.  Today one bought an entire trolley of unusual shrubs and trees, and we had a very nice chat about the ways of foxglove trees.  A delightful couple, both bent with age and walking on sticks, bought a walnut tree.  The only way to get it into their saloon car was through the sunroof.  Lucky the tree was out of leaf and they didn't have far to travel.  He thanked me as I wrapped the trunk to make sure it didn't chafe, and told me not to get old, it wasn't worth it.  I reminded him that as the saying went it was preferable to the alternative.