I learned this morning that somebody who used to work in the plant centre had died, in her fifties, of cancer, a little over three years after the diagnosis. I only met her a handful of times, because we were never rostered to work on the same day, but it was a sombre thought, and sadder for my two colleagues, who did work with her. They will go to the memorial service next week. I can't remember who it was who said to me recently that we were reaching the stage of life where invitations to funerals started to outstrip those to weddings, but I'm afraid they were right.
The watering took until ten, when we put the hoses away. I spent the rest of the day wandering about with cans of water looking for odd dry pots, and putting very dry ones in buckets of water to soak for a quarter of an hour, in between helping customers and stints on the till. Sun and strong wind are a lethal combination for plants in pots, drying the compost out in no time, blowing the pots over, and sending the water everywhere when you try to use the automatic watering system. Just before five I resumed watering by hand, which allows you to direct the water on to the roots and pick up any rogue pots that have blown over. We covered the herbaceous section, roses, herbs, and some of the display tables, and were able to use the automatic irrigation on the trees because the nozzles are so close to the ground that the spray has less chance to blow out of the bed before it hits the compost, but there wasn't time to do everything. At five to six we stopped, tilled up, locked up and went home. One can only do so much.
A stray late customer queried whether it wasn't too hot to water plants, and wouldn't they get brown spots on their leaves. I read an article somewhere recently debunking that particular widely held gardening belief. Certainly the farmers irrigate their crops at all hours of the day. My colleague's rather tart response was that it was a choice between watering the plants when it was hot, or leaving them to die of thirst.
The robins fledged yesterday, or the day before. Last night when I was watering in the greenhouse I looked at the nest and it was empty, and the SA said they weren't there earlier in the day. They made their escape just in time, as today's scorching sun really would have given them heatstroke. I remember that they made an equally abrupt disappearance last year, and since every last pot was exactly where I left it in the greenhouse, with no signs of disturbance, I think they must have gone voluntarily rather than the nest being robbed by a magpie or cat.
When I got home I had to do my own watering, though at least the Systems Administrator helped, and check my new woodland charity digital slides for a talk on Tuesday, to avoid last minute panics. The charity sent them out as a PowerPoint presentation, which the SA has kindly converted to a sequence of JPEGs on a USB stick which is what my digital projector uses. Number 27 has rotated ninety degrees anticlockwise on the stick, though it looks fine in PowerPoint on the laptop. This is a mystery to the SA. All of it is a mystery to me, but the SA has all of tomorrow to fix it. Thank goodness today was the last six o'clock finish. That gives me a whole three quarters of an hour spare after work tomorrow to mug up on the new presentation. I really don't have the energy now.
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