spring is almost sprung

Spring seems to have almost, but not quite, arrived.  The boss was grumbling that the peacocks begin screaming at four in the morning, so they believe it's spring.  I've seen a few queen bumble bees about in the last few days, and some foraging honey bees on the flowers at work and in the garden at home, but they still aren't out in force.  I've been feeding mine for the past couple of weeks, as I was worried that winter had lasted for such a long time they might be running out of supplies, and they've only had one decent day when they were really flying in numbers to replenish their stores naturally.  I'm down to one tee shirt under my uniform shirt and fleece, but I'm not swopping the fleece trousers for the cotton water repellent ones just yet.  I did take my hat off for a bit.

The customers believe it's spring.  Today was the busiest I've seen yet.  In between helping people look for plants, and doing my stint on the till, I put labels on a lot of roses.  The way to avoid scratching yourself handling roses is to move slowly and carefully (rather like handling bees) but even so by the end of it I'd added to the network of light scratches on my hand and wrist collected pruning the roses at home.  Some of the roses had customers waiting for them to come into stock, some dating practically a year back.  It takes a certain nerve to ring up a list of strangers and explain that the rose they were asking for last April has finally arrived.  If they still want it, naturally.  An amazing proportion of them do still want the rose.  I don't know why they didn't just order them bare root from a rose grower last November.  Some people clearly don't like doing that.  Still, it helps our turnover.

There was another tale of damaged bay trees, this time twenty standards, a painful loss for anybody.  The bark is peeling off their trunks, so it sounds as though the top growth really has had it.  They will probably regrow from ground level, but the customer wants standards.  I thought she should maybe have put pipe lagging round the trunks for the winter when she saw it was turning into a really nasty one, but it seemed tactless to say so now.

The local authority is mending the potholes on the route to work with glacial slowness.  A really nasty one on the main road has finally been filled in, but the back lane I use to cut across country has some huge and evil holes.