It was quite like old times, working on a Friday. I used to do Fridays when I started at the plant centre, then at one point upped my days to Fridays and Mondays as well as alternate weekends, discovered that three days a week was too much, and dropped the Fridays. We used to get a delivery most Fridays, though, from a local grower who has since ceased trading. I visited their nursery once, on a trip organised by the Hardy Plant Society, and I wasn't surprised when they subsequently went bust. It was a ramshackle affair, with assorted polytunnels and outdoor beds sprawling, weed-covered, in random directions, and compared to the huge, tidy, computer controlled multi-span greenhouses at Nottcutt's propagation side (since spun off into an independent company) that I'd visited with Writtle, it looked hopelessly amateur. It might have just worked for a sole trader, doing it for the love of the thing and making a tiny income in exchange for working 52 weeks a year, but as soon as you started employing staff and having a wages bill to contend with it didn't look a runner.
I think they mostly grew shrubs on from liners, the industry jargon for cuttings rooted by somebody else specialising in propagation, and I rather think that their liner supplier ceased trading a while before they did, which wouldn't have helped matters. This is only an educated guess, based on the unlikely similarity between the list of shrubs they supplied, some quite obscure, and those listed by the liner supplier, who advertised in Amateur Gardening and used to sell direct to the public by mail order as well as wholesale to the trade. I used to shop with them, working my way through their list, and enjoyed growing their stuff on, so I was sorry when they packed up. I think the owners of that business reached retirement age and couldn't find anybody to carry it on. The plant centre's now defunct supplier also used to sell direct, and would bob up at plant fairs selling at incredibly low prices, undercutting the retail nurseries there, some of whom were their own customers. This used to cause some ill-feeling, but it's all history now.
The boss told us how important it was to sell as much as we could, and how we should try and persuade customers to accept substitutes if we didn't have the variety they were asking for in stock. I duly attempted to convince a woman who rang asking whether we had Escallonia 'Donard Radiance' that while we didn't have that one, we had lots of other nice Escallonia, but she was not convinced. She wanted to know whether we could get it in for her, and I had to confess that while I could take her details, I wasn't sure that the manager would be ordering in more Escallonia in the near future given we already had a good choice. She is going to ring and ask him next week, another thing for him to deal with when he gets back from holiday.
My presence on a Friday was rather disorientating to my colleagues in the plant centre, who were left with the uneasy feeling that it must already be Saturday. Tomorrow when the person I swapped days with and who normally does Fridays goes in it will be even worse for them, as time will then appear to be running backwards. The Systems Administrator was sitting in a deckchair when I got home, minding the chickens, but looking rather woebegone and admitting to having a headache. I am not at all convinced that we will be going to any family barbecue tomorrow afternoon, but we'll see. When life throws up unexpected events like illness then weekend working becomes even more complicated, having to decide 48 hours before the event whether to still arrange to take the day off, instead of just deciding on the day if the sufferer is up to going out.
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