another busy day at the plant centre

Today was a busy day.  There are still odd bits of potting: this afternoon I potted up some rootballed lilacs and yew and a few bare-root crab apples.  A couple of colleagues were on a roll creosoting (it is actually creosote substitute now that old fashioned creosote is banned.  'Creosoting' is like 'hoovering'.  You can't say that you spent the day creosote substituting, any more than you would say that you had been dysoning).

Plants are moving around the plant centre in great swirls and eddies.  The polytunnel on the far side of the car park ('the other side') is so full that the aisles are mostly reduced to half a trolley's width and the potting bench is jammed into the smallest possible space just inside the tunnel door, but bulbs that we potted last autumn, like tulips, daffodils and alliums, have started going out for sale.  Some shrubs that were put under cover in the plant centre to protect them in the worst of the winter have also been put out again, which keeps us all on our toes when it comes to helping customers find things.  Viburnums were in the tunnel with the climbers last time I was at work, but today they were back outside on the opposite side of the walled garden.

Customers sometimes find it confusing that shrubs like hollies, that they thought were hardy, have been put away in a tunnel for the winter, but there is a great difference from the plant's point of view between spending the winter outside in a black plastic pot, which may well freeze solid in cold weather, and having its roots safely in the ground.  Even during periods of frost the ground is rarely frozen more than an inch or two deep (though I don't know how far the frost penetrated last December).  Frozen roots can be particularly tricky for evergreens, because they can't take up water, while their leaves are still losing moisture through transpiration.  Anyway, the hollies, viburnums, osmanthus and arbutus have all been turfed outside.

There will be a lot of deliveries in the next few days, and some of the plants will have customers waiting for them.  Unfortunately the system for matching new stock to eager would-be purchasers is rather basic.  We have a list of customer names and their desired plants.  Plants arrive.  The staff try to spot which of the arrivals are on the customers' wish-list, in between interruptions and distractions while we do lots of other things as well.  Occasionally well-meaning customers who have obviously been conditioned by too much supermarket shopping wave their purchases at us at the till, enquiring 'don't you want to scan the bar code?'.  Er, no thank you.  We don't actually use bar codes.