The Italian plants had arrived at work. They came on Friday, later in the week than we were expecting, but still on a day when I wasn't there to help unload them. One of my jobs for today should have been to put the labels on them, with prices and descriptions, but the boss hadn't done those, so I couldn't. I compromised by helping my colleagues for half an hour as we removed the netting sleeves the plants were packed in to travel. Imagine the sort of plastic netting tube some Christmas trees come in, and you get the general idea. The wrappings stop the branches from getting tangled with each other and broken during loading, unloading and transport, and squashes the plants smaller so that more will fit in a lorry. It is amazing how most shrubs will put up with being trussed up as if in a straitjacket, and then spending several days in the back of an articulated lorry, but I feel sorry for them by the time they reach us. I want to release their confined limbs, and let them breath. In the hours after taking the netting off you can see the branches relax, and the leaves move back into a more natural orientation relative to each other, and the light. They really do look grateful.
I had a look to see what had come in. Most were things we stock regularly, so there weren't many surprises. A lot of clipped standards in various varieties of holly. We get virtually all of our standards from Italy, except roses. I think the Italians have the skills to produce them, and it may be that plant growth is faster under an Italian sun than an English one, so that the trunks thicken to a marketable size more quickly. Whatever the reason, they seem to be an Italian speciality. There were some large and very nice plants of the butcher's broom, Ruscus aculeatus. By large I mean large for a Ruscus, a slow growing species. These were a good fifty centimetres high, whereas the last ones that came in, from a specialist nursery down in Devon, were nearer five. There were some chunky looking Danae racemosa as well.
Perhaps the labels will be ready tomorrow. Or on Monday. Quite a few varieties come in at several different sizes, so matching label to pot requires some thought. It is embarrassing to put shrubs out for sale at £19.95, and then discover that you have labels for £39.95 for smaller plants of the same variety. If you run out of labels, or think you have too many, that should sound alarm bells, since the boss is normally pretty good at printing the right number, and the manager is very hot about checking off deliveries.
The disagreeable discovery was that after tomorrow the new cafe people are giving up until the spring, and we will be back to dishing out tea and cakes in between manhandling plants off lorries. Oh dear. I really thought we had solved that particular problem, and now here we are back at square one until March. By the middle of this morning my hands were filthy, as I'd been weeding pots of herbaceous plants and dressing their tops with fresh compost, and compost had worked its way inside my gloves. I couldn't serve in the cafe in that state. Not that I want to serve in the cafe anyway, so it's quite fortunate to have a good excuse.
A regular customer came in and chose four trees to be delivered. I remembered to ask her if she needed tree stakes, ties, and rabbit guards and she decided that she did. I helped someone else find the particular sort of evergreen Euonymus that he wanted, by dint of searching around on the ornamental displays, and spent a long time on the phone describing what Euonymus europaeus forms we had in stock, to somebody who had seen them on Gardeners' World. And I pointed out the different forms of climbing hydrangea we had to somebody who came in thinking she wanted one climbing hydrangea, the usual deciduous form, and ended up buying two, a less usual evergreen species and an even more unusual variegated one. So I tried hard to follow the boss's early morning injunction to sell, sell, sell.
The boss was in rather a good mood, so I seized the moment when I was not in disgrace for being implicated in till errors, failing to set the house alarm or other staff misdemeanours and asked whether he was able to sell me some straw bales for the chickens. It turned out that he ploughs his straw in rather than baling it, to add the organic material back into the soil, but he thought he might be able to get me some straw. A neighbouring farmer who might have some bales owes him a favour, apparently. I thought the boss would have straw for the horses, but it seems not. They live out. That shows how little I know about horses. I don't know any farmers either, except for the boss, despite living in the country, or at least not well enough to ask them a favour.
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