potting

At work the financial year end has passed, the days are lengthening, and new stocks of herbaceous plants have started to arrive at the plant centre.  This morning a ten tonne lorry arrived from Norfolk with six thousand plants for us, which was the entire lorry load.  Some were already potted, on Dutch trollies (those multi-storey aluminium trolleys with wheels you may have noticed in garden centres) and some were bare root divisions in cardboard boxes for us to pot up.  These are in addition to the roots needing potting that arrived last Friday, and are starting to get a bit etiolated and sweaty in their plastic bags.

I enjoy the occasional day potting.  I wouldn't want to do it five days a week all year, as it would get repetitive, and standing all day at a potting bench is actually harder physical work than walking about, but it is interesting to see what has come in, and what the root systems of different species and varieties are like.  There is a certain Goldilocks art to potting everything to the correct depth, not too deep and not too shallow, and a detective art to working out which way up some of them should go.  Indeed there is an art to unloading the lorry when you have half a dozen people involved.  The suppliers make one label do for all 20 or 30 of the same variety, stacking them on the same shelf on a trolley and relying on us to keep like with like when unloading.  Once two different sets of dormant hostas have been mixed up you are completely sunk, until they come into growth and you can see which is which.  We pot into a herbaceous compost which has an anti vine weevil chemical in it, and nothing is allowed out for sale to the public until we can see roots at the bottom of the pot.  A few things like Incarvillea have the exasperating habit of flowering before they have rooted in properly, which is a nuisance.

The ready potted stuff just has to have labels stuck into every pot, but of course they are at ankle level while you do it.

Addendum regarding Fitzroy  I got yesterday's biographical details from the Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia, since the main thing I knew about him was that he founded the Met Office.  In passing I had noted that the BBC (why does the BBC website have an entry on Robert Fitzroy?) said that he was the fourth great grandson of Charles II.  At the time I thought little of it, but returning later in the evening to Jenny Uglow's splendid book about Charles, 'A Gambling Man' (a Christmas present) my brain belatedly tottered into gear.  Charles II did not have any legitimate children, but there on page 199 is a little black and white reproduction of Lely's portrait of Charles' beautiful and temperamental mistress Barbara Castlemaine, with their son Charles Fitzroy.  At school I was taught that the Norman name Fitz denoted son.  My informant who read history at university and did include the medieval period (more than I did) tells me that Fitz specifically denotes illegitimate son.  Fitzroy, Fitz Roi, bastard son of the king.