Blimey. All those customers who gushingly declare that they would love to have my job, it must be such a wonderful place to work, ought to try it on a day like today. It rained. It was windy. It was cold. The plants fell over. There weren't many customers. Those that did come deserved to get a medal.
The new tea area has grown window frames since I was last there, though the windows themselves aren't ready yet, and the holes in the wall are still neatly boarded over. The interior walls have received a fresh coat of brilliant white paint, which will disappoint my colleague who was hoping for something warmer. We were all asked to think of any refreshments that we ought to stock in addition to the tea and cake, and I wrote ginger beer on the list, but refrained from adding 'lashes of'.
The big excitement from my point of view was that the new garden guide arrived from the printers. The owner was disappointed with the front cover, which she had expected to be a brighter shade of green. Apparently her printer told her that it was her own fault for using her web designers to design the booklet, as web designers never understand colour printing. We all thought that the colour, a dark olive, was good, even if unintentional. They used my text almost verbatim (I've just checked against the last draft I sent her). There are a couple of flourishes I suspect the boss of having added, and a couple of mangled substitutions I blame on the web designers, having seen their original wording for the website. Why alter 'the course of the natural stream' to 'the adjoining watercourse'? 'Adjoining' is a word straight out of estate agents' particulars (along with the phrase 'benefits from') and subtly alters the meaning, to something meaningless. And I'm slightly worried that plant names I used in their common sense, like rhododendrons, have been capitalised and put into italics to use them in their botanical sense, while retaining the plural s at the end. Still, overall it is almost exactly what I wrote and I'm quite chuffed to see my words in a printed document that somebody actually paid for.
The annual rainfall at work is even lower than I thought. I'd put it at 570mm, based on the nearest local site I could find records for on the internet, but the boss has revised that down to 510mm. Many garden guides don't bother to include any information about the growing conditions, and that always irritates me. As I go around a garden I like to know what sort of soil it's on and how much rain it gets, to put the planting in context.
A man wearing heavy work boots and a fleece with the logo of another garden on it took away five trees, six tree ties and a pair of gloves, saying they should be invoiced for. I was pretty sure I recognised the name of his garden, and it would be an odd sort of scam, to have a fleece made specially and then use it to take five trees without payment. I didn't know him though, and it is a bit odd that our sales staff are supposed to just let people who say they get invoiced walk off with stock. I asked a while back if we could have a list of customers who were on invoicing terms, but nothing ever materialised. If eventually we are scammed I suppose at that point we'll slam the stable door.
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