I have done my three day stint in the plant centre. The low point is having to get up on Sunday morning. After a decade of working part time including alternate weekends, the concept of the weekend is not fixed so firmly in my mind as it was when I was a Monday to Friday office bod, but there's still that residual feeling that normal people do not rise at six on Sundays and make themselves a packed lunch in a plastic snap-top container, instead of combining a meal in a pub with a spot of garden visiting, or eating a big fat lunch with their friends or relations. Monday seems more like a day to leap up, and by lunchtime I'm on the home straight to a whole six days to spend as I will.
As predicted, there was a lot of watering. The owner put on her watering boots, the gardener and one of the people who works behind the scenes potting and tidying were co-opted, and yesterday's absentee turned up for work, so we had almost more hands to the pump than the water pressure could cope with. I ran the automatic irrigation on the shrubs and herbaceous plants, but we checked them and watered by hand as well. I was pleased that the owner came out to help, having an instinctive respect for leadership from the front. In fact I found after she'd finished the herbaceous section that there was a dry patch in the Verbena, but that's what happens, when you are trying to get a lot done in a limited amount of time. In the plant centre, the imminent arrival of customers at ten means we have to be pretty much finished by then, as we can't risk them tripping over the hoses, and anyway the owner had a meeting at ten. I soaked the worst Verbena four at a time in a bucket of water, and they looked happier.
The wind got up through the day, so that while the plant centre had looked quite tidy at the point when we opened, by mid afternoon there were plants lying prone in all directions. I managed to tie a couple of repeat offenders to convenient bits of furniture, but was defeated by one particularly large shrub (more of a small tree), and left it lying down for the second time in two days, with a note to the boss saying that I didn't like to tie it to the downpipe of the heated tunnel, in case it ripped the pipe off the next time it blew over, and suggesting he get a couple of the chaps to move it tomorrow to a safer place. If it fell on a customer it could cause real injury.
A customer came to the till with two Romneya coulteri in her trolley, and asked me in all seriousness whether she could have a discount on them, as 'they looked a bit sad'. I had to explain to her that that's what Romneya look like in pots, and furthermore that they are notoriously difficult to establish in the garden, to the point that if they didn't succeed, we didn't undertake to replace them. I explained how they grew, that it was normal for the existing top-growth to be killed in the winter, but if the plant survived it would throw up new growth from ground level in spring, so it was a good idea to mark where the Romneya was in the border, to make sure you didn't accidentally tread on the new growth. She bought one, even after I'd told her that in my own garden I finally thought I'd succeeded at my third attempt. She hadn't seen the vast specimen by the loos in the Beth Chatto garden, or read the latest RHS magazine where Romneya is one of the plants of the month, and I admired her tenacity, after I'd laid out the pitfalls. Romneya coulteri is a spectacularly beautiful plant, when growing well, with large, white, papery, poppy-like flowers at the ends of long stems with grey leaves. Perversely, once established it runs about like mad, but as the RHS magazine article said, what a nice problem to have.
And now I am going to sit out of the wind in the conservatory, which I tidied up last week, and look at the garden through the windows which I washed. I don't often do that.
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