We finished unwrapping the Italian plants today. They were trussed up like chickens for their drive up from the nursery in northern Italy in an articulated lorry. This allows many more plants to fit in the space, and prevents them from getting tangled up in each other and then having leaves or branches torn off during unloading, but they do arrive looking quite stressed. Apart from the fact that it is dark in the lorry, air can't circulate properly around their leaves while they're tied up, and once untied they begin to look happier almost at once, as their leaves relax back to their proper angles.
The arrangement of leaves on a plant is a wonderful thing. The reason why a beech wood is so dark once the beech leaves are out and little will grow beneath a beech tree, is that every leaf is positioned so that the canopy in aggregate receives the maximum amount of light, and each leaf is shaded as little as possible by other leaves. Stand under a mature healthy beech tree in summer and you won't see a flicker of sky, just a total cover of beech leaves. Plants generally orientate themselves to the light, hence Chelsea designers like to get the planting in their show gardens done a couple of days before judging, so that the plants will look natural by the time the judges come round.
The Italian grower uses two kinds of netting. One has a small, neat, diamond pattern, and will rip tidily along its length once started off with scissors. That's fast and easy to remove. The other is a looser weave, made of thin, cutting threads that are painful to pull apart with your bare hands and won't rip in any direction. That is an absolute and complete pain to take off the plants, as bits of it wrap themselves around twigs and leaves and take an age to untangle. I hope not too many waste lengths of it end up as litter after use, because any small creature that got tangled up with it would be likely to stay tangled, and face a painful and lingering death. It really is nasty stuff.
One couple who were planning to sell their house were sizing up what larger plants we had and how much they cost, as they considered whether to create a new border in front of a long, dull stretch of fence to improve the look of the place. I didn't think it was my job to talk them out of this scheme, given that it would be a useful sale to us, and for all I know would help them market the house, but I thought that my heart would sink mildly at inheriting a mass of Photinia x fraseri 'Red Robin' and Cornus alba put in as a job lot by the previous owner. After they had gone I realised that a creative approach to the problem would have been to suggest trained fruit trees, which potential buyers might find more exciting.
Most customers seem pleased about the new tea room, though a few people are against the whole idea, fearing that we're about to turn into just another garden centre, and start selling gas barbecues, fleeces and novelty clocks instead of plants. The boss's parents are going to perform the grand opening, so his mother plans to go on the staff training day so that she knows how to work the coffee machine. My colleague asked me whether I was going, but I'm not. I haven't been asked, and I couldn't, as I have a haircut booked for that day, and have to clean the house and do the cooking for a lunch party the following day.
I put a great many plants out for sale, and swept one of the shrub beds as instructed on the manager's list, and by around four o'clock was feeling quite tired, and glad that there was enough of a steady trickle of customers to justify my staying at the till. My colleague volunteered to sweep dead leaves out from among the pyracanthas, but she has more moral fibre than I have.
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