It was grey and it rained. I am beginning to feel like a demented parrot telling you that. One of the customers yesterday said that she felt like a caged animal, unable to get out into her garden. In the morning when it was not raining too much (there were even spells when it didn't actually rain, and was just grey, and very humid) I pulled the trees off the tree line, starting at Acer, weeded them, dressed their pots with a layer of fresh compost where needed, and sprinkled them with a pre-emergent herbicide to try and cut down on the weeding. The wind wasn't very strong, but they still all fell over, once untied from their wooden racks, and I suggested to the manager that we'd better delay the top-dressing and weedkiller stage until we were ready to put them back.
The most time consuming part of my task, apart from making sure that I didn't tread on any of the fallen trees, was scraping the accumulated lichen, moss and slime off the mypex fabric covering the bed. There was a lot of slime, and it took a lot of scraping. The manager allowed me to get a head start, then followed behind, pruning the trees where needed to make more balanced heads, and tying them to taller canes if they'd overshot their existing ones. Or at least that was the plan, but it turned out that we only had five foot canes and had run out of longer ones. The manager also took the executive decision about which trees to relegate to the half price area. There's no point in having trees hanging around in the plant centre for too long. They get potbound so that they will never make decent specimens, and they get too tall to go in people's cars so most people won't buy them anyway.
At lunchtime it rained a lot. In the afternoon the rain cleared to light drizzle, but by then the manager had discovered that his uniform coat was not waterproof, and was tired of having water dumped down his back by every tree he touched, so I was sent to tidy up the climber tunnel, which entailed putting the clematis back in neat rows, untangling them from each other and trimming off any long shoots so that customers who wanted to buy one could pick up just the one and not half a dozen, and scraping up more slime but on a smaller scale. I disturbed a large toad, which looked at me worriedly and flopped away across the mypex, making a flubbering sound with each shuffling hop. It did that typical toad thing of initially moving just far enough away that I couldn't reach or see it, but was liable to disturb it again as I worked along the row. Toads are not ones for making good their escape into the blue yonder in one headlong rush.
The manager was very excited because one of the customers was a famous person, and gave him her autograph for his children when he asked, and was really nice about it. I enquired who that was, and it turned out that the pleasant faced woman I'd said good afternoon to through the tree line was Mel Giedroyc. I had utterly failed to recognise her, having only heard her on Radio 4's Mel and Sue years ago. I scarcely watch any TV, and the Great British Bake Off passed me by. I am glad she was nice. It's always rather disillusioning to discover that someone whose work you have enjoyed is deeply unpleasant in person (I have never felt quite the same about Cider with Rosie or A Rose for Winter since reading a biography of Laurie Lee). Anyway, Mel Giedroyc got through the reality test with flying colours, and her husband was equally pleasant. Even their children were well behaved. They were on their way home to London from a week on the Norfolk Broads, which would have been enough to try anyone's patience in this weather.
The owners' son showed us the puppies first thing, and I was given one to hold. It was very sweet, though I was rather worried because it shivered constantly and I thought it might not like me holding it, and then because I thought that it was not at all toilet trained and that it would be difficult to work all day with puppy widdle down my uniform, should there be an accident. The pea hen did not like the rain, and was eager to come into the shop with her chick, so they spent a large part of the day lurking just outside the shop doors, baby cheeping pathetically, ready to sneak in with any passing customer. Once inside they made straight for the tea room area, in search of cake crumbs. It was very cute but not hygienic. True that as I write I have Our Ginger asleep on the other end of the kitchen table, but this is not a commercial catering establishment, and it's well known that germs off one's own pets are not nearly so dangerous as those from pets in cafes and restaurants.
Addendum Award yourself an outsize literary brownie point if you can name the poet from whose work today's title is taken. There is no cash prize, but you are entitled to feel smug.
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