chill winds

The chill winds of recession are blowing through the ornamental plant industry, even if the economy is technically back in growth.  One of our suppliers is shutting down their nursery from next week until after Christmas, with the staff put on unpaid leave whether they like it or not, while another has just laid off forty people.  At the plant centre the owner has been looking for volunteers willing to reduce their hours, with a couple of part timers dropping days or laid off until spring regardless of whether they volunteered or not.  My truthful answer to the question whether I wanted to reduce my hours over the winter was that no, honestly, I did not want to.  Although I knew trade was quiet, I needed a part time job, not a casual job.

It's a difficult one.  If I lost a day's work a fortnight, or even a day a week, between now and the beginning of March, that would be a few hundred quid.  In the grand scheme of things between now and when I start drawing my pension that isn't so much.  And the owner isn't alone in trying to cut staff costs to suit her cloth.  Earlier this evening I was reading an article about an electrical manufacturing business up towards Bury St Edmunds that has put the workforce on to short hours rather than make compulsory redundancies, faced with a falling order book.  But once I accept the principle of dropping days when it's quiet then I become a casual worker in the owner's eyes, and this won't be the last time.  And I am good at my job, better, dare I say it, than some of my co-workers.

Meanwhile, the manager found three nibbled bags of peanuts in the bird food section, so Ruby the white terrier was right.

After lunch I was finally given some labels for the Italian plants, though by no means all of them.  Putting labels on plants is one of those unskilled jobs which it is amazingly easy to mess up.  You can put the labels on the wrong plants, because you confuse different varieties that look vaguely similar and happen to be standing close to each other (how similar depends on your ability to see plants.  A former co-worker perceived no difference between Choisya and a narrow leaved form of Pittosporum tobira).  Or put labels on the wrong plants because once you have read the first couple of words in the name the rest of it passes you by.  Cornus kousa  var. chinensis 'White Dusted'.  Cornus kousa var. chinensis 'Wisley Queen'.  Whatever.  You can put two labels on different branches of the same plant, so that another goes out for sale without a label at all.  This is especially easy to do if the plants are sitting in a trolley, and you decide to save time and effort by not taking them out.  You can put the label on to a deciduous plant so that the only thing stopping it from dropping off the end of the twig to which it is attached are the leaves, which are going to drop off themselves fairly soon, instead of putting it lower down below a point where the twig branches.  You can put the label on upside down, which is surprisingly easy to do if the plant is on the ground and you are stopping down over it.  You can joyously and randomly put ten Edgeworthia chrysantha labels on ten plants, irrespective of the fact that the plants come in two different sizes at two price points.  I managed not to do that today, by dint of reading the labels as I was going along.  If you suffer from passive-aggressive tendencies then given a lorry load of Italian plants you can indulge in all of the above, on purpose.

We had buyers waiting for some of the labelled plants, so I made a couple of calls, and at least one person still wanted the Danae she had been waiting for since April.  A would-be mail order purchaser of a couple of Euonymus and a Viburnum henryi, who had telephoned last Thursday to find out what we had in stock, called again to place an order, and by today we had run out of the Viburnum.  It's never a good idea to let these things drag on, with rare shrubs.  Strike while the iron is hot, once you've located your plant.

Let us hope that things pick up come the spring.  It would be very sad if it turned out that in the new flat UK economy we could not afford the sort of specialist plant retailing that has grown up in the past half century, and were back to people swapping roots and cuttings with their neighbours, plus a few specialist societies, and small, fanatically keen growers selling rarities to a few passionate gardeners while content to live in poverty on a diet of lentils.  There again, this has been an exceptionally wet year, and it might all be looking better by March 2013.