dank

It was drizzling this morning when I got up, and one of the cats had been sick in the upstairs sitting room.  I suppose drizzling makes a change from raining, and at least there wasn't a dead partridge on the doorstep.

There wasn't an overnight frost.  We cleared away the fleece from the most tender plants we'd covered up last night, and returned the ones we'd wheeled under cover in trolleys to their proper places.  A colleague helped me finish emptying the red trolleys, and we had those done by lunchtime.  My other designated job for the day was to move the Dierama and Crocosmia back under cover, not so much because of the cold as because they were getting too wet in their pots standing outside.  Then I tackled one of the tasks on the list of general jobs, which was to clean up the box hedging plants in 2L pots, and then I managed to attach myself to the till in the shop and warm up a bit.  It was really too cold to start sweeping down the tree line, after shifting all those pots.  I had visions of my back locking solid, and not moving again for the rest of the week.

I never saw the goldfinches at all, but did notice a pair of chaffinches spending a lot of time in the border at the bottom end of the plant centre, and began to suspect that they were nesting in one of the wall climbers.  Late in the afternoon a colleague spotted the female perching with a worm in her beak, which after a time flitted into the climber, so we were pretty sure there was a nest.

I never saw the sun at all either.  It rained, lightly and persistently, for almost the entire day, the sky a dull grey.  When we came to write up the weather record for the day, we decided the word to describe it was Dank.  Very dank, Suffolk.

The dire weather is hitting trade hard, which is a great shame.  The plant centre is looking really nice, with all the plants in lovely condition, and some very interesting and unusual things in stock.  Normally the first May Bank Holiday would be a very busy weekend for us, but customers just aren't coming.  I can't blame them.  It is not much fun walking around in the drizzle, with the thermometer reading eight degrees and the air feeling like six, choosing plants, and their gardens probably aren't ready for planting.  They probably aren't fit for walking on.  It is discouraging for the owners, especially with the tea room just opening.  I took some consolation from the words of an American (or Canadian.  I have a tin ear for accents) who was on her first visit to us, and who said that it was the first garden centre she'd visited in my country that didn't make her depressed.

When I got home I asked the Systems Administrator how much rain we'd had so far in May.  The answer is 53mm, and most of that fell in 48 hours at the start of the month.  It represents over 10 per cent of the rain we'd expect in an average year, and 9 per cent of the actual rain we've had on a rolling twelve month basis.  Don't you just love an English spring, and a May Bank Holiday?