another talk

I'm doing another talk tonight, this time on bee friendly gardening to a garden club.  I talk using plants as props, not slides, which many audiences seem to like.  You don't have to put the lights out, for a start, and the speaker can make eye contact with the audience, and it seems altogether more like a live experience than sitting in the dark while somebody lectures (one hopes not droning on) about a set of slides.  Also they can buy any plants they like the sound of to take home.  The downside is that I can't always get hold of some plant I really want to talk about, and they aren't always prime examples, like the Fuchsia 'Hawkshead' I'm taking along, which along with all the other fuchsias at the plant centre has been lightly but perceptibly touched by frost.  Plus, of course, I have to drive over to the plant centre to borrow the plants.  All in all it amounts to a day's work, but at least half of it is done in the evening, leaving me with some daylight hours free for gardening.

It's a funny thing going to your place of work on a day when you're not working.  I'd checked as a courtesy with the manager that it would be OK for me to borrow the plants (it always has been in the past, but it never does to take things for granted), but he had the day off today.  My colleagues were surprised to see me, and I explained that I was borrowing plants for a talk, and that the manager knew about it, and introduced myself to a woman who does tea shop duty during the week, whom I'd never met, though I'd seen her time sheets.  My keen new young colleague hovered around the trolley of plants as I finished picking out packets of seeds in the shop, chattering socially and incessantly, which was slightly distracting in that I was trying to make sure I hadn't forgotten to pick up anything on my list, then asked me with a faintly defensive and proprietorial air what the drill was, then.  Did 'we' keep a list of what I'd taken.  I said that no, they didn't, I just brought the plants back and paid the money for any I'd sold.

I could see where he was coming from.  He previously worked for a large garden chain, where I think they did have measures in place against staff theft.  Somebody else who worked there once mentioned bag and car searches.  We don't.  If I'm buying plants for my own use, on days when I'm at work, I put them through the till myself, and am trusted to do so.  You could have a system whereby everybody had to pay via a colleague, or the manager, and where the manager or owner reserved the right to do spot checks of cars at the end of the day, but we don't.  In the end the owners have to decide whether or not they trust us.  So if I were to want to steal from my employers, which I don't, I could think of far easier and more subtle ways of doing it than marching in on a day when the manager wasn't there and 'borrowing' a trolley load of plants, and if I thought my employers believed I might steal from them, I wouldn't want to work for them.

My colleague's (probably unwitting) air of suspicion highlighted how odd it is to go to your place of work on one of your days off.  Suddenly you aren't part of the team.  If the phone rings you don't answer it (I do find myself pointing customers in the right direction if they ask where things are, because so many of them recognise me by now).  If I'm taking plants back on a non-working day I don't touch the till, but ask somebody else to ring things through for me.  On non-working days at work you are neither fish nor fowl.  You know how things work, but aren't expected to do anything about them.

Back in the garden at home I sat for a while under the 'Taihaku', listening to the sound of the bees working the blossom, then went on with digging around the yellow bamboo, until driven in by a hailstorm.  I haven't been out to look yet, but I hope it hasn't done too much damage to the cherry flowers.