After all of those Met Office severe weather warnings of heavy rain, we had 5 millimetres in the night. Five millimetres. That's the equivalent of just over a quarter of an inch in old money. Be Aware, high probability of puddles.
This morning started windy, and got windier as the day progressed. Wind in the plant centre is the very devil. We stood the plants up that had fallen over in the night, and some of them instantly fell over again. Most pots seemed to have got a reasonable amount of water into them, what with the rain and the irrigation being set to run for five minutes overnight. However, as the wind blew ever stronger and the sun beat down, things started to dry out. There's only a limited amount you can do about that, while you have a plant centre full of customers.
We did have an unexpectedly large number of customers, and were down to two people again, though at least we had a tea shop girl. The third plant centre assistant didn't turn up. Apparently she missed some days last week as well. Eventually she rang, saying she was not up to coming in, and had left a message earlier. This has been going on for a couple of years now. The person concerned has some issues in her private life, and the owner and everybody else have tried very hard to be helpful and supportive. It isn't the first time that two of us have battled through the day short-handed because this colleague was a no-show. The last time she stopped coming in, the owner was concerned enough to go round to the house she was living in at the time to check that she was all right. I really don't know whether any of it is doing the slightest scrap of good, or whether we have collectively become enablers for her to continue to follow a chaotic lifestyle. One of these days the owner is going to decide that it can't go on, but I have no idea when.
The owner or the boss could theoretically have stepped into the breach, but had quite a good excuse, in that it was their son's birthday. I still remember him as a snot-nosed six year old, whereas he is now a teenager who towers over me. My friend and colleague at the plant centre who lives in the village (in fact born and bred there. Her father was the village baker) recently saw what she thought was a man and a girl pass by her garden on horseback, and only recognised them as our employers' son and his sister when she heard their voices.
I didn't get very far with the manager's list of things to do, but managed to disentangle around a dozen clematis from each other, so you could now buy a C. 'Jackmanii' or C. 'Jackmanii alba' if you wanted to. Somebody did want to buy a C. montana which had started climbing up into a magnolia, and succumbed to the embrace of another clematis, before I got that far along the row, and I had to go and disentangle it for her specially.
The owner of the wonderful Fullers Mill Garden came in. I greeted him enthusiastically and reiterated how much I'd enjoyed his garden and had been recommending it to people, and he beamed with the justified pleasure of one receiving praise of their life's work. I asked him the name of the rose in his garden with tiny, ferny leaves with a greyish cast, and pink flowers, and he told me it was 'Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother', but I haven't yet been able to track down any such rose on the net.
There is going to be a lot of watering to do in the morning.
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