The warmer weather is bringing the customers back like migrating birds. Some are regular visitors to the plant centre, commonly seen any time between spring and autumn. Others are new sightings. Some have made their way purposely to us in search of a particular plant, while others have the air of having just blown in and landed at random. We greet the familiar faces, and try to be nice to all of them.
New plants are starting to arrive in quantities too. The choice of herbaceous plants at this stage seems arbitrary. We've suddenly got the full gamut of hollyhocks, some lupins, a few achillea, and for some reason Centaurea montana and Hesperis matronalis. Delightful cottage garden plants, the last two, but scarcely the first names that would spring to mind if putting together a core range. The glasshouse-fresh foliage, so different to the winter-burned leaves on plants growing outside, is designed to tempt. Why else have a choice of half a dozen dwarf pinks, which won't start flowering for at least another month? Pots of Fritillaria meleagris, brought on under cover, are blooming weeks ahead of the ones in the garden. Bread-and-butter shrubs are starting to arrive too, variegated forms of Pittosporum tenuifolium and pyracantha. To a plant enthusiast they are not nearly so fascinating as the twigs that came in last week, but they score far more highly as eye candy.
We had to do some watering, outside as well as in the tunnels. We are out of practice after the winter break, hoses not in the right place, routes round the plant centre not honed to a precise routine. It takes a few days to learn to split the watering with a new team member. Initially you find dry patches that each person thought the other had done or would do, then with practice you develop the unspoken understanding that is a mark of all good teams, and everybody knows what the others are going to do without any need for discussion.
The manager had got us moving some of the shrubs that have over-wintered in the shelter of the tunnels back outside. We weren't too sure how cold he was expecting it to be tonight, as he'd also left instructions for us to wind down the tunnel sides, tuck fleece over the agapanthus and turn off the pump and the water tank at the end of the day. Turning off the irrigation fell to me, the other two saying they didn't know what we were supposed to be doing, so I hope I have clunked the correct lever and turned the right stop-cock, not being mechanically minded.
There were a couple of mystery plants to identify from samples. One looked like an alder of some sort, but not the common one, unless it was from a specimen that was doing far better than any of mine. The other looked more like some kind of Genista than anything else I could think of, though I was puzzled that the people asking had never noticed it flower. They await the manager's verdict on Monday morning, as does the almost-but-not-quite dead Hydrangea quercifolia, that has gone backwards for two and a half years. I wonder if two fierce winters separated by a drought sapped its will to live. All will be revealed on Monday.
The sun shone and the birds sang. Somebody brought in a gigantic and amiable black dog called Max, who wanted to smell everything, and thought that his owner's views on where she wanted to go need only have a very loose influence on his own progress. At home Max likes to sit on the sofa. She had to buy a second sofa. If you like plants and people watching then an up-market plant centre is an entertaining place to be, in the spring.
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