what's in a name

Driving to work this morning, I saw a poor dead cat ahead of me in the road in the neighbouring village.  I could tell it wasn't a rabbit long before reaching it, and sure enough, it was a white cat with tortie patches.  That didn't get my day off to the best of starts, as I felt sorry for the cat, and imagined its owner missing it in the morning, and going to have a look for it outside, or seeing it through the bedroom window when they opened the curtains.

Arriving at the plant centre I discovered I hadn't quite finished emptying the red trolleys yesterday, in that there was a quarter of a silver shopping trolley of plants abandoned in one of the aisles that I'd never got round to putting out for sale.  I must have been distracted by the phone, or a customer asking me a question, and forgotten that it was there (or maybe it was an example of the Freudian process of repression as a factor in forgetfulness, and I just didn't want to remember it).  Either way, I emptied it, and after the watering turned my attention to tidying up the herbaceous tables, the next job on the manager's list.

At this time of the year most of the plants in the herbaceous section are new and clean, and don't really need weeding.  They need tidying because customers muddle them up, and in some cases staff don't understand what order they should go in, and sometimes because there are simply more pots than will fit in a given section of table, and someone has to take the time to budge them along or consolidate them to create the necessary gaps.

Customers muddle plants amazingly.  I saw this today as I began at the beginning of the alphabet, at A for Acanthus mollis, and by half past five I'd got the end, V for Viola sororia, so spent the last twenty minutes until it was time to shut the tunnels and till up going quickly round again from the beginning.  Half the pots of Delphinium 'Magic Fountain Dark Blue' were already jumbled in with a different variety of Delphinium, presumably by somebody dithering over which sort to choose, and which were the nicest looking plants.  As I was tidying up first time round I found odd plants abandoned in completely the wrong section, so I suppose those customers suddenly changed their minds completely and decided they didn't want a Geum or a Helenium at all, and couldn't be bothered to take the pots back to the right place, or couldn't remember where they got them from.  You see the same thing in supermarkets, when a box of eggs is dumped randomly in the baked beans or a jar of olives pops up in the jam section.

Many more customers, having picked a pot up to read the label (we are increasingly clever about physically attaching labels to pots, otherwise people pull them out to have a look and stick them back absolutely anywhere) put the pot down vaguely where it came from, but the fact that the pots are in neat rows, and that all the labels face the front, passes them by completely.  Or they can't be arsed.  I suppose I try on sweaters in shops and then put them down again not nearly as neatly folded as when I found them, but I can't fold sweaters like that when I try.  Putting things in rows is a cognitive skill I should think your average five year old should grasp with ease.

Errors on the part of the staff are partly because we don't always read the names properly, and partly down to suppliers printing abbreviated and partial names on the labels.  Delphinium Blue Bird Group comes before Delphinium 'Blue Jay', but you have to be concentrating quite hard to notice that, particularly when you are tired and have dozens and dozens of boxes of plants to put out.  I sometimes wonder if one or two of my co-workers are mildly dyslexic, though nobody has ever outed themselves as having spelling problems.  The wretched suppliers introduce confusion by abbreviating plant names, so Campanula glomerata 'Superba' becomes Campanula superba, and ends up within campanulas under S instead of G. Plants that we pot up and grow on ourselves in 2L pots always, but always, have the full name because the boss is fanatical about that sort of thing, so we end up with bought-in 1L pots of Geranium 'Wargrave Pink' separated by rows of other pots from the 2L home-potted Geranium x oxonianum 'Wargrave Pink', when both are exactly the same thing.  And suppliers hate name changes, so while the boss dutifully writes labels for sedum variety 'Herbstfreude' the suppliers stick with the snappier (to the English ear) 'Autumn Joy'.  (They are of course synonymous, but under the rules of nomenclature the earlier name takes precedence, which in this case is the German one.  That's why Penstemon 'Garnet' should really be P. 'Andenken an Friedrich Hahn', if you are being correct about it).

Mind you, the boss is starting to show his age and resist name changes.  He refused to countenance the fact that the botanists have decreed that the smallish grass Stipa arundinacea should now be called Anemanthele lessoniana, harrunphing that all the customers know it as Stipa.  The river of change rolls ever on, as I saw the other day that we are supposed to call Dicentra spectabilis something else, and it is no longer considered a dicentra.  Gardeners hate change.  Some of the printed coloured labels supplied with our hostas still helpfully give the alternative name of Funkia, and I thought that went out with Gertrude Jekyll.