I arrived at work to find that last week we were burgled. Late at night thieves broke the door to the gardeners' shed off its hinges by driving a car into it, jemmied open the box where the power tools are locked away, and took them, all smashed and grabbed in less than five minutes. The boss heard the shed alarm going and went out to investigate but missed the intruders, and now says he should have parked his Landrover across the gate, first off, so that they couldn't leave the property. It is probably better for his personal safety that he didn't manage to intercept them. The police were impressed at the quantity of locks, but it was all in vain. Chainsaw, strimmers, hedge trimmers, all gone, with the exception of the chain saw on a pole, which must have been too unwieldy for them. The boss holds out little hope of seeing them again, although as his name and postcode are deeply scratched into every one, nobody except an out-and-out crook would want them.
It was thus that the older gardener returned from his holiday to be greeted by the news that he had virtually no gardening tools, until lunchtime when boxes of new ones were delivered, but that left him free to mend the puncture on the boss's tractor, which the boss wants urgently. Also he noticed that the water tank for the irrigation system was not filling up, which is more than I did, and fixed it by dint of switching the pump off and switching it on again (you see, it doesn't just work for computers).
The young gardener and the woman who normally works behind the scenes potting and weeding helped with the watering, and I thought we'd made a pretty good fist of it, but by mid-day pots seemed to be drying out again, and I ran several mercy missions with cans of water. The woman who works in the office was back from her holiday too, and between us we managed to deal with the e-mails, though quite a few of the replies were really circuitous ways of saying Dunno, have to get back to you on that when the manager's here. Lucky old manager, he is going to have a big pile of paper to get through.
I spent a fair part of the day filling gaps on the ornamental display tables and rearranging some of my colleagues' less satisfactory (in my view) plant combinations. They still have four days when I'm not there to mess them up again, but I should have the last word, since I'm working next weekend and the manager will be back on the Monday. It rained briefly at one point, and I had to take refuge in the climber tunnel and cut excess growth off the jasmines and Holboellia. It goes against the grain to cut off nice healthy stems, but people won't buy them if they have grown into each other.
My young colleague who was supposed to be doing the cafe was suffering from the after-effects of food poisoning, and there was inexplicably no cake. I was relieved when the owner returned, bearing cake boxes, and took charge of the tea room.
At the end of it all I just had to buy a fig for the Italian garden, a variety called 'Ice Crystal', with enormously pretty deeply cut leaves. I never saw it until last week, when I was instantly seized with covetous longing, but thought I'd better go home and measure the space first. It is new and rare, according to the BlueBell Nursery. I'll be taking a chance growing it in the open ground, since BlueBell and the boss's label both talk about it being suitable for a wall, but our gravel is so free-draining I feel it's worth a try. If it is occasionally nipped back in a hard winter that won't be a catastrophe, as long as it's not killed outright or severely maimed, since the space I've found for it is not as large as the twenty feet that Bluebell suggest it will need at maturity, or even the boss's more modest estimate of twelve feet.
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