cold and quiet

It was freezing this morning, minus 2 degrees according to my car, and I was afraid I should have put the heater on in the greenhouse, but by then it was too late to do anything about it.  Then it rained for the second half of the morning.  Then it was just very, very cold.  Dank.  That's what it was, dank.  We had about as many customers as you'd expect in a plant centre on a day that was freezing, raining and dank.  Not even the lure of the shop, with its mugs and tea towels and locally made wooden pepper grinders, was enough to bring them in.

We sold a few more Christmas trees.  I adopted a policy of strict honesty to people who rang up asking whether we had trees, which was to warn them that the trees were rather tall, and not very bushy.  A pleasant couple from Dedham whose name I can never remember managed to find an unexpectedly balanced specimen tucked in among the oddities.  I'm glad they got a good tree.  They came along once to a lecture about a local architect held by the arts society, but left before the wine and nibbles, so I missed the chance to offer them a cheese straw and say hello in my member of the art loving middle classes persona instead of my upmarket shop assistant one.

We tidied up the evergreen grasses, and the Primula, and the Physalis (Chinese lanterns, only two left) and the Phuopsis (pink flowers, smells of fox) and the Ligularia, and the Tanacetum.  We ran out of things to clean up that weren't frozen, as I should have brought more trollies of plant inside the shop last night to keep frost free, only I wasn't expecting that much frost.  Eventually we ran out of plants to clean up on the manager's list of weekend tasks, and I was reduced to going outside and pulling dead leaves off the Hemerocallis.  It was cold.

I consoled myself with imaginary planting plans for the areas of the garden I'm clearing out.  The poorly Rosa rugosa 'Alba' could make way for an Enkianthus, or a Sorbus 'Copper Kettle'.  Enkianthus was my original idea.  It has flowers like heather bells, and glorious autumn colour, and I liked one at Wisley many years ago.  The Sorbus could grow too large, but I could clean a good length of trunk so that we could walk beneath the branches.  It has white flowers, and autumn leaf colour, and orange fruits as well, so it is one feature up on the Enkianthus.  I saw one at Hergest Croft (a wonderful garden on the Welsh borders) a few years back and was utterly smitten.  Hellebores beneath, either way.  I find thoughts of plants very consoling.  They are a good subject to think about during trips to the dentist.

At home the Systems Administrator had got a fire going in the top sitting room, as it's Sunday night and we're having roast beef.  The fire was lit at lunchtime, and loaded with coal as well as logs, and the big radiator turned on.  By 4.30pm the temperature had just edged up to 18 degrees, and one ball in the Galilean thermometer that lives on the mantelpiece had dropped to the bottom.

Addendum  I also came home to the news that Vaclav Havel had died.  I heard one of his plays on the radio, years ago, and liked one line so much that I wrote it on a post-it note and kept it stuck to my office computer screen.

'Only a corpse is never fooled'

I found that very consoling too, when I had made a bad call about some investment decision or other.