It was another blustery day, too lively on the weather front and too quiet as regards customers. The manager is beginning to wear the stressed and haunted look of someone with family and financial responsibilities, working in a sector that is under the cosh. If you add up the retail failures of the past year it is not a reassuring prospect.
One of my colleagues had tidied up the small Edwardian greenhouse at the back of the plant centre, so I took advantage of the space to clean up yet more herbaceous plants under cover, out of the wind and drizzle with a proper work bench at a sensible height, and my prunings not blowing half way across the plant centre instead of landing in the bucket. It is much more comfortable and productive than trying to weed and deadhead the plants one-handed, while using the other hand to hold the pot against my stomach, which is how I end up working half the time. As I weeded I mused on how we could bring in more customers. Yesterday's coach party was a welcome boost. I would like us to contact as many garden clubs in Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Herts as we can find, and invite them to include a stop at the plant centre when they're planning their summer excursions. I would target these counties because they are within reach for a day trip, so people who had been once with a tour and been impressed could return under their own steam. Happy customers from Wales and the north of England are very nice, but they aren't likely to turn into regular visitors. I don't know how you find the contact details of all those garden clubs, but I would start with the RHS to see if they can supply a list of affiliated societies, and then I guess sit down with a road atlas and start shoving the names of likely looking villages into Google. I would try and build up the exisiting mailing list of individuals as well, by offering existing customers some sort of deal in return for the names of their garden-loving friends, who could have a deal as well. It seems to work for Boden. I'm convinced that even in a difficult retail climate there are people out there who would shop with us, if only they knew we existed. Reducing the number of days the casuals work, and delaying replacing the person who left recently, conserves a tiny bit of cash but doesn't really get us anywhere.
I mused too on the futility of trying to organise other people's gardens. Two of yesterday's customers were another mother and daughter pair, but not a happy and collaborative one. The mother presented me with the problem in her daughter's garden, that of a large patch of dry shade. I showed them to the tunnel where we keep the shade loving plants. Mahonia was rejected because the daughter already had one of those, and Ma didn't like the suggestion of Fatsia either. Would it survive another winter like the last one? I replied that she hadn't told me that guaranteed hardiness to withstand a once in twenty years cold winter was required in addition to drought and shade tolerance Mother was a thin woman with a hard face, daughter a podgy one who displayed minimal interest in her own garden. I made a few other suggestions, including Sarcococca, and the thought that if the shade were really very dark and dry then a nice statue might be the answer. They thanked me and let me get back to the coach party. The next time I saw the daughter she hadn't chosen any plants, and was looking at things in the gift section of the shop with much more enthusiasm than she had shown for anything growing outside. It seems to me not merely futile but counterproductive to take command of any garden except your own, unless you are a professional and the garden owner has made the conscious choice to subcontract the problem in exchange for money. The unenthusiastic garden owner just feels even less sense of ownership and involvement at the end of the exercise than they did before, once their friends or relatives have tried to boss them around.
Tidying the Hemerocallis I found that some of them had made small plantlets mid-way up their flowering stems. I snapped these off the stems (not spoiling the flowers) and potted them up, a trick I tried last year and got a very high strike rate. Free plants are hard to resist, and if I don't use the shoots as propagating material they will only be thrown on the compost heap when the stems are cut down after flowering. Last year's haul yielded me several 'Chicago Knockout', which have made good sturdy plants, and a couple of 'Eleanor', which are still rather small but are growing. This year I got a 'Lemon Bells', a 'Joan Senior' and four 'Pink Damask', three of which already had one little root at the base of the sideshoot so should be fine. We'll see if they take. I've put them in the greenhouse inside a propagating case to conserve moisture, but another hot spell could simply cook them.
The day dried out briefly over lunchtime, but in the middle of the afternoon it rained torrentially. It was a monsoon. A river ran down the middle of the climber tunnel and a small lake enveloped the shade structure. After the rain had passed and the puddles began to drain away there were tide marks in the car park, where the fallen flowers from the lime trees had been swept up. When I got home I discovered that the rain had made it on to the national BBC traffic news, and that the A12 had been shut on the Essex-Suffolk border. At home we hadn't had any, and the Systems Administrator had been able to sand off another section of the front of the house, and let the chickens out for a run.
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