When I came downstairs this morning I discovered that one of the cats had been sick in the hall, and that the chicken's water was running out. I cleared up the hall floor and refilled the galvanised drinker, but it was a bit of a scramble getting off to work, what with making my packed lunch, filling up the bird table and collecting the eggs (one egg, very small. The mad old bat ancient lady chicken has decided that anything more than a pullet sized egg is too much for her nowadays, which is fair enough).
It was an absolutely beautiful morning, still and sunny. The compost in most pots was still damp from the rain, but I ran the overhead irrigation in the shade tunnel for a few minutes, as the hydrangeas and rhododendrons are so leafy and dry out quickly. The sun caught the fine spray of water and made the tunnel look like a scene from a tropical forest, and I thought how much more pleasant it was to be standing in a Victorian walled garden looking at a sunlit mist of water and listening to birdsong on a Monday morning than to be sitting in an office looking at a screen and worrying about the latest unfolding of the Greek debt tragedy.
The dog has been fitted with a little tinkly bell on her collar, in the latest battle against her urge to explore and abscond. As the gardener and I were eating our lunch in the staffroom we heard a tiny metallic sound. I opened the door and in came the dog, who knows that there is food in the tennis hut, besides being a sociable creature. I called the boss on the radio to say that we had got the dog, and presently the woman who works in the office came to collect her. (Staffroom makes it sound rather grand. We call it the tennis hut because it was used to store tennis gear in the days when there was a tennis court on what is now the car park, but it was originally built as a cart shed. You can tell this from the wide lintel over the bricked-up former door, before it was fitted with a bijou Edwardian porch. That and the fact that the brick floor appears to have been laid directly on to the earth).
I was allowed to redo a couple of display tables, and enjoyed a mini-Oudolf moment with Stipa gigantea, Perovskia and Agapanthus, shading off into white hydrangeas and hostas. I removed some ginger-brown Heuchera that were arguing with some pink flowers I think they were intended to complement, and put them around some terracotta balls with star shaped holes pierced in them, where they looked much more harmonious. Somebody actually bought one, though as she bought several other Heuchera as well this may have down to prior intention, and not my finely honed merchandising abilities.
After lunch I volunteered to stake and tie in the climbing roses, as I knew that this was on the manager's list of things to do. He seemed incredulous, and pathetically grateful, that anybody had actually offered to do this job without having to be cajoled into it. Staking roses isn't so bad. We use 3 foot canes (garden canes are still not metric. Don't know why) and any whippy bits of growth that are long enough to be tied to the cane are attached with green tape using a tie-gun. I don't begin to understand how a tie-gun works, and they are temperamental bits of kit that don't always work anyway. You squeeze a handle, and two arms come together and jaws on one arm grab the end of the green tape that is fed down the other arm from a spool. You release the handle and the jaws open, pulling out a length of tape. You press the tape against whatever you are trying to tie up, in this case one or more rose stems to a cane. You squeeze the handle again and the jaws close, staple the tape into a loop around the stems, and cut it. Periodically you run out of tape, or you run out of staples, or the tape jams, or breaks, or piles up in multiple folds in the stapler and fails to cut through. A customer who was once watching me coaxing a tie-gun into working said that he would have thrown it across the room several minutes previously, and that I must have the patience of a saint. I don't, though there are times when it would be useful.
I suppose my colleagues don't like tying in the roses because of the tie-gun, and because the roses are prickly, but I only got slightly scratched. One branch pricked me on the face, a tiny scratch that at home I would have ignored, but it bled for ages and I didn't think I could go on working in the plant centre with smears of blood on my cheek, so had to go and staunch the flow in private with a paper towel until it suddenly stopped. Another rose caught me in the thumb as I was setting the pot down, quite deep. That hurt for a minute and I went and found a plaster for it, before I could get compost in the cut. But as ways of amassing brownie points go, tying in roses isn't too bad, and it probably made up for the fact that I had completely failed to grasp what I was supposed to be doing with the new guide to the gardens, which I should have finished ages ago.
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