The watering took ages. Two of us were dragging hoses around the plant centre until nearly half past ten, with the sparky girl who runs the tea room at weekends posted at the gate as a meeter and greeter to warn customers not to fall over them. My other colleague was busy watering over on The Other Side until half past eleven, and got soaked in the process because the hose fitting was leaking. I watered the two sections of shrubs where the automatic irrigation has been broken since the spring which came to four beds, and the front edge of the shade structure where the overheads don't quite reach, and the rhododendrons and azaleas because their dense foliage blocks the overheads from reaching the surface of the compost. I watered the hydrangeas because they are always thirsty, and the assorted shrubs stood on the gravel at the bottom of the plant centre not covered by any automatic system. I watered the display tables along the central aisle, and then started on the herbaceous section, much of which was bone dry so that the pots kept blowing over in the wind and I had to hold the lance with one hand and the pots with the other. My colleague started at the opposite end of the herbaceous tables, and we met at the penstemons, by which time the cuffs of the fleece and shirt on my left arm were sodden.
It was so bad because it had been windy for so long, and made worse by the fact that it was not done properly by hand yesterday. Running the overhead irrigation on the herbaceous tables when it is windy doesn't really do the plants a lot of good, as so much of the water blows away sideways without ever penetrating the compost, and it would have been better if the owner had not told us yesterday to run all the automatic irrigation because there wasn't time to hand water, thus giving the triathlete licence to opt out of any hand watering in the morning. There would have been time with two people doing the herbaceous tables, as we did today. Watering on Sundays is always more thorough than on Saturdays, because my Sunday colleagues take it more seriously.
After that the day seemed to drag a little. I weeded the pots of fruit, which meant that I'd done both of the jobs on the manager's list. I checked for e-mails as instructed by the manager, but there weren't any, and it turned out that the two I'd replied to yesterday, by pressing Reply, composing succinct answers (no, sorry, we don't ship to Germany but in any event we don't have that shrub and can't get it, no, sorry we don't have the dahlia you're looking for, believe it has lost vigour in recent years) and pressing Send, had gone not to the potential customers but back to the Boss's computer. I'm not on Outlook at home, and the manager's two minute training session on how to use the networked system at work must have missed out one or two key features.
The boss told me that today was my chance to harvest yellow rattle seed, since it was ready and he was sending the gardeners in to collect it tomorrow. I duly trotted down the arboretum armed with a piece of paper to wrap it in, in lieu of an envelope, and realised that I didn't actually know what yellow rattle seed looked like, and couldn't even recognise the leaves. I'm so used to seeing the yellow flowers, vaguely dead nettle like, and looking knowledgeable when somebody says That's yellow rattle, that I never looked at the rest of the plant. I collected several stalks bearing bladder-like inflated pods, arranged one below the other down the stem in the same way as rattle flowers are, and hoped that I'd got the right thing. Certainly I couldn't see any other likely looking candidates.
On getting home I looked up yellow rattle seed pods on Google images (where would we be without it) and that was fine. The seed pods look right, and the odd couple of leaves that came with them (narrow, very vaguely reminiscent of Perovskia). The boss said I must sow it at once, though when I queried whether it would wait until Tuesday the answer was yes. Having seen how long it took me to collect as many pods as you can wrap up in one sheet of A4 I now think that the commercial price of ninety-something pounds a kilo quoted by the Systems Administrator's brother sounds very reasonable. It must take an absolute age to harvest a kilo of rattle seed.
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