I took the plants back to work this morning. If it had been a fine, dry day, good for gardening, I'd have hung on to them over the weekend and taken them in with me on Monday, saving some time and petrol. I've done that before, and the manager doesn't mind, as long as I look after them conscientiously. He does the same thing himself. However, when I went to let the chickens out it was drizzling, so gardening wasn't on the cards anyway, and I thought that if I took the plants straight back it would save me taking them all out of the car and putting them in again, while if I left them by the front door and it rained over the weekend then I'd be faced with a car load of wet plants first thing on Monday morning.
I didn't see any of my colleagues in all the time it took me to unload the car and put the plants back in their right places, only a girl inside the shop running the cafe. I left a note for the manager saying I still owed for the three I'd sold and would pay on Monday, since there was nobody about. It did strike me that it was just as well I was bringing plants and not taking them, since if I'd walked in knowing what I wanted, loaded up a trolley and walked straight out again, I doubt whether I'd have been challenged. I still don't know the answer about whether a healthy Skimmia japonica would respond well to hard pruning to reduce its size, since I never saw the manager to ask him.
When I got home there was a message on the phone from the person who booked me for last night's talk, saying that they'd all enjoyed it and would probably ask me back for 2014, if I could send her a list of my talks. That was nice to hear, since I'd felt rather crestfallen to have sold so few plants. Although, as the Systems Administrator pointed out, the village where I was speaking was close to work, so there was less incentive for people to buy on the night instead of going to see the full range than if they'd been a forty-five minute drive away from the plant centre.
Christmas has got a step closer in that I've ordered the pudding. About a quarter of a century ago I made one, but it was pronounced not so good as the SA's mother's pudding, which I took as a signal not to make another one, and have been buying them ever since. For years now I have bought our pudding from The Ultimate Pudding Company, sold in aid of the Barn Owl Trust, apart from one year when they were too late sending me the leaflet, and I panicked and bought one in aid of a donkey sanctuary. They are extremely nice puddings, made by a small firm in the Lake District which has hit on the idea of marketing them via charities. I told the SA I'd ordered the pudding, who said, Ah yes, handmade by barn owls. This is a dialogue we have every year. Repeated once a year it is still amusing (to us. If we had teenage children they'd be biting their fists with embarrassment each time they heard it).
The loss of the UK population of ash trees has got a step closer as well. The Guardian ran a story on this three weeks ago. I asked the boss about it, but he had not heard about a new ash disease, and poo-poohed me rather brusquely, saying that there were all of these European and government led scare stories about tree diseases, which never came to anything. The boss is deeply Eurosceptic, and it didn't help that the story was in the Guardian rather than the Telegraph, but I felt at the time that his reaction was a touch fingers-in-ears, lah-la-lah-la-la I can't hear you. The manager hadn't heard anything about a new ash disease either, so I told him to read the Guardian. Yesterday the news broke in the papers and on the Today programme that the disease had been found in two woods in East Anglia, and today I received a press release on the subject of ash dieback from the Woodland Trust. I hope it is not too late to stop it. The UK's past record on Dutch elm disease is not encouraging.
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