Now that it's November, the working day at the plant centre runs from 8.15am until 4.00pm. In theory it ought to be easier to get to work by quarter past eight than eight on the dot, but in practice any change in starting time throws me out in the morning until I get used to it. Advancing by fifteen minutes the point by which I should have cleaned my teeth, put my shoes on, put my uniform shirt on over my T shirt, and so on, for each stage in the process of getting myself fed, equipped with lunch, with clean teeth, fully dressed and heading out of the door, is confusing. I am prone at the best of times to regard leaving the house as a frictionless and instanteous act, forgetting that collecting everything I need, locking the front door and climbing into the car does actually take a couple of minutes. I think that taking a strict view of timekeeping I was probably late, but as the owners weren't around a strict view was not taken.
It was raining lightly but persistently, which gave me a chance to try out the car park attendant coat for real. It isn't bad, still rather stiff, and my hands need to learn the routes to the pockets, but it is waterproof and wasn't either too baggy or too constricting. The cuffs can be shut down with velcro tabs in wet or cold weather, and were pleasingly willing to stay shut, rather than popping the velcro apart and opening out at intervals. The coats have the company logo on the back, mercifully fairly small, and a grey oval at the nape of the neck, on which one of my colleagues had written his name in black marker pen. I flatly refuse to walk around in a coat that has my first name written on the back of my neck. By the end of the day my coat had the beginnings of the usual patch of compost on the stomach, from cleaning pots, and I expect I'll soon learn to recognise it.
We are still packing plants away in the polytunnels for the winter. I don't think anybody else has got any further with the heated tunnel since I was working in there on Monday. I made reasonably progress today, though I got stuck minding the shop for chunks of the afternoon. It worries some customers to see plants that they thought of as hardy being put under cover in November, and I have to explain the differences between a plant having its roots in the ground, and having them frozen solid in a black plastic pot. Today I finished cleaning up the Genista, and brought in Ligustrum (except varieties of L. ovalifolium), one particularly precious shrubby honeysuckle, the hardy hibiscus, the curry plants, hebes, and Oemleria cerasiformis. This last one is a beauty, a large, suckering, deciduous shrub that produces very sweetly scented white flowers in about February. It likes humus rich soil and will tolerate semi-shade, so we're talking woodland edge conditions, and I want to plant one in the very end of our wood. Just as soon as I have pickaxed out the roots of the Rhododentron ponticum. I resisted the urge to buy an Oemleria before I had prepared the site, to avoid placing a hex on the digging out project. In general it is better not to buy plants before the site for them is anywhere near reading for planting, as site clearance has a way of taking longer than you ever expect. Sometimes a year or two longer.
There was a piercingly sweet and clean scent in the tunnel, which I tracked down to the Mahonia. Mahonia flowers are good value in an enclosed space. I never notice my M. japonica in the open garden as much as I do when they are in a tunnel, or the car.
The owners were shooting, or at least the shoot was in use. I knew this because most of the radios were missing, and through the day there were periodic bursts of gunfire from beyond the garden walls. I heard the crunch of tractor tyres at lunchtime, presumably as the guns came back for their lunch. They are ferried about the estate in the back of a horsebox, seated on straw bales, with a little metal gate to stop them falling out of the back. As I was leaving the landrover pulled into the car park, pulling a horsebox containing a horse, and one of the owners got out, dressed in black jacket, riding hat and immaculate white jodphurs, so she must have been doing some horsey thing and not shooting.
Because it doesn't get dark until half past four and the owners don't want to pass by the opportunity for a few late sales, they ask for a volunteer to stay after 4.00pm. The deal is that whoever stays can come in late another time. I didn't volunteer. I'd already arranged to call on a friend after work for a cup of tea, and as a point of principle if I'm going to work late I'd like to be paid for it. I don't regard half an hour at the end of the working day, when you are tired, dirty, possibly cold and hungry, and have other things to do, as being equivalent to half an hour before the working day. What am I supposed to do with an odd half hour in the morning? It isn't long enough to settle to anything, and would just be wasted in faffing about. And like I said, I find changing start times confusing. I am not a total jobsworth. I will stop on my way home to shut the car park gate or bring in the sign, as we all do, in our own time and after we have completed our time sheets. But I believe in drawing the line.
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