As I was standing in the hall this morning, piling on more layers of clothing in preparation to leave the cosy kitchen and go to work, a muntjac walked right past the front door, travelling from the direction of the wood towards the lettuce farm. That's not such a welcome wildlife sighting to start the day.
It was very quiet at the plant centre. The temperature never rose above 3 or 4 degrees C, and it's forecast to get colder, so I can't blame people for not feeling an immediate desire to come and buy plants. Even the inside of the shop felt cold.
We received a visit from a woman who is staying with the owner's parents, who had been given the impression by somebody that we had Pterocarya fraxinifolia in stock. I'm not quite sure how that came about, as I don't think any member of staff told her that. After we'd failed to find any about the plant centre we asked the boss, who checked on the computer and confirmed that we probably hadn't any, so told the gardener to take a mattock and dig a nice straight sucker up for her from the tree in the arboretum. P. fraxinifolia is a lovely, large tree, with big divided leaves ('fraxinifolia' = leaves like an ash, Fraxinus. The clue's in the name), and huge, dangling greenish white catkins in summer. I have admired the boss's tree in full bloom, but never grasped that it was such a prolific suckerer. My colleague took the customer to see the sucker being dug up, and because she wanted to see the tree for herself, and reported that the suckers were coming up over an area of tens of square metres. The Hillier manual says that it is happiest in a moist loamy soil, and is particularly suitable for planting near lakes or rivers. It sounds like the boss's specimen is extremely happy. His father-in-law's friend began to look rather alarmed, and to talk about keeping her Pterocarya in a pot.
I tried to finish the pots stock take, but some didn't have labels, or even prices, and the names on the stock list were as arbitrary and ridiculous as Ikea furniture designs, so there was no logical way of matching physical pot to stock item on the print-out, if you weren't already in the know. It began to drizzle. My cold, which had been seeming to go away, resurged last night as a spectacularly phlegmmy cough, and I didn't think that standing about outside in the cold and rain was doing it any good at all.
None of the staff know what is happening about the tea room. After a flurry of builders arriving to quote nothing else happened, and I presumed that in view of the Eurozone crisis and general economic doom the management had decided to conserve their cash and postpone it, but today the owner went on a food hygiene course. Maybe she is just planning ahead. We are surely getting too close to the busy spring period to have the builders in now. Any kind of change at work always seems to take a very long time. When I first worked there, the tills were outside in a small garden shed. The owner and the boss spent a year agonising over whether it was a good idea to move them inside, and even after they had bought new counters to put the tills on, the tills stayed in the shed for several more months while the new furniture stood unused in a corner at the back of the shop. Also when I started working there we didn't have uniforms, and after the idea was mooted that we should wear something that made in obvious who were members of staff, reps from assorted work wear companies were summoned in to a whole series of meetings stretching out over months, bringing samples of our logo stitched on to various fabrics, before it was finally agreed that we would have a uniform, what it would be, and who would supply it. Same with website designers. So I expect they'll get there eventually with the tea room, but they might need another year or two first to get used to the idea.
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