another quiet day

One of the hoses at work split while in use.  The resulting spray of water was quite impressive.  The gardener was summoned to fix it, and cut out the damaged section, butting the two severed ends together around a short length of metal pipe that he presciently kept in his tool box, and fasting them tight with jubilee clips.  It won't be good as new, unfortunately, because the jubilee clips will tend to snag on corners.

The other gardener was a no-show because his car has broken down, and is still at the garage, and he lives thirty miles away in mid-Essex.  He was off on Friday as well, so that is two days of his annual holiday allowance used up to no great purpose.  Happy is the lot of people in jobs where you can elect to work from home for the day.

After doing my share of the watering I spent part of the morning calling people to let them know that plants they'd been looking for were now here.  It took some nerve to call the person who had asked for a lilac, Syringa hyacinthiflora 'Esther Staley', back in November 2009.  I wondered if it was too absurd to even pick up the phone, but the manager said that 'Esther Staley' was incredibly difficult to get hold of, and he hadn't been able to find any at all last year, so these really were the first plants we'd had in stock in the past eighteen months.  I got her answerphone and left an apologetic and rambling message.  She may have moved house by now, and the new occupants may be utterly mystified by it.  Some other people I rang had forgotten even asking for the plants, but sounded as if they wanted them.  If customers come into the plant centre to collect one thing they often end up buying other things as well, so it is worth calling.

It was still quiet, though.  The weekend was apparently quite busy, and a big order that was going to go out next month might just fall into this month instead, because nobody is available at the start of next week to drive the van, but I fear we are going to end the month shy of where we should be.

The peacock seems to have made a full recovery from his eye infection, following the boss's daily applications of antibiotic ointment.  Apparently the poor bird's head had swelled to twice its normal size at the worst, and the boss was convinced he would lose the eye.  He told me that peacocks don't merely lose their tails after the breeding season, but actively pull them out, then grow a fresh set of feathers next spring.  I have read a theory that the tail works to signal the peacock's health and strength by effectively saying to the hen 'Look what a hunky chap I am. that I can afford to lug this cumbersome tail around with me', so if it is in the way I suppose he might as well not bother with it at times of the year when he isn't trying to impress the ladies.

another busy day at the plant centre

Today was a busy day.  There are still odd bits of potting: this afternoon I potted up some rootballed lilacs and yew and a few bare-root crab apples.  A couple of colleagues were on a roll creosoting (it is actually creosote substitute now that old fashioned creosote is banned.  'Creosoting' is like 'hoovering'.  You can't say that you spent the day creosote substituting, any more than you would say that you had been dysoning).

Plants are moving around the plant centre in great swirls and eddies.  The polytunnel on the far side of the car park ('the other side') is so full that the aisles are mostly reduced to half a trolley's width and the potting bench is jammed into the smallest possible space just inside the tunnel door, but bulbs that we potted last autumn, like tulips, daffodils and alliums, have started going out for sale.  Some shrubs that were put under cover in the plant centre to protect them in the worst of the winter have also been put out again, which keeps us all on our toes when it comes to helping customers find things.  Viburnums were in the tunnel with the climbers last time I was at work, but today they were back outside on the opposite side of the walled garden.

Customers sometimes find it confusing that shrubs like hollies, that they thought were hardy, have been put away in a tunnel for the winter, but there is a great difference from the plant's point of view between spending the winter outside in a black plastic pot, which may well freeze solid in cold weather, and having its roots safely in the ground.  Even during periods of frost the ground is rarely frozen more than an inch or two deep (though I don't know how far the frost penetrated last December).  Frozen roots can be particularly tricky for evergreens, because they can't take up water, while their leaves are still losing moisture through transpiration.  Anyway, the hollies, viburnums, osmanthus and arbutus have all been turfed outside.

There will be a lot of deliveries in the next few days, and some of the plants will have customers waiting for them.  Unfortunately the system for matching new stock to eager would-be purchasers is rather basic.  We have a list of customer names and their desired plants.  Plants arrive.  The staff try to spot which of the arrivals are on the customers' wish-list, in between interruptions and distractions while we do lots of other things as well.  Occasionally well-meaning customers who have obviously been conditioned by too much supermarket shopping wave their purchases at us at the till, enquiring 'don't you want to scan the bar code?'.  Er, no thank you.  We don't actually use bar codes.