cold Easter

Speaking as a non-Christian, it seems a waste to have the bank holiday weekend so early in the year.  Today was raw cold at work, the sort of dank, chill air that grips the back of your throat and makes you think you must be going down with another cold.  My nose dripped all day as if it had a faulty washer, until I had to substitute a paper hand towel for my original hanky.  Customers, shrouded in layers of clothing, fumbled with numb fingers for their credit cards and money.  Oh, the joys of an English spring.

The cold weather disagreed with the back door in the shop, which failed to open half the time even when somebody was standing inside it.  We had to scuttle over from the till to let people out, and the sparky girl who looks after the tea room did sterling service nipping to the end of the kitchen and pressing the door open button.  A few customers managed to find the button for themselves, so perhaps they had been watching the people ahead of them in the queue, but most stood baffled, waiting to be let out.  We tried leaving the door permanently open some of the time, but that made it jolly cold for whoever was standing at the till, not to mention those sitting down in the tea room.  When all of the people in your cafe are still wearing their coats I think you have an issue.  The boss is going to have to fix the door.

My job for the day was to ring people to let them know that plants they had been waiting for had arrived.  It always feels rather awkward calling someone to try and interest them in buying a plant they asked for this time last year, and a secret relief if for the most long-standing queries you just get an answer machine, but amazingly some people did still want their plants.  It takes a certain consistency of purpose to ask for Alstroemeria 'Rhubarb and Custard' in May 2011, and not have found something else to fill the space before April 2012.  Some people had found the plants elsewhere in the meantime, or been in recently and bought them without getting their names crossed off the list, but that's only to be expected.  Some sounded pleased and grateful to be rung, as well as thoroughly surprised, and none were hostile.

I came home via the house of the beekeepers' Membership Secretary, and so got one of the required signatures for my bank mandate change form.  She raised the question of whether she and the Chairman could jointly sign a cheque, both being signatories and two signatures being required, or whether one of the signatures had to be that of the Treasurer.  If that's the case then I need to track down the Chairman as a matter of urgency, since until we've got the mandate changed we can't pay anybody for anything, and we have a hefty bill outstanding for wax for the recent candle making day.  Another question for the outgoing Treasurer.

I got home to find the Systems Administrator sitting in a deckchair in the front garden, wearing a thermal hat and looking cold, staring at the chickens who were eating grass.  I asked whether it wasn't rather cold to let them out, and was told it had been warmer when the sun was out.  The trouble is that the chickens know exactly how to play on the SA's heart strings, rushing up to the door of the run squawking and looking eager and anticipatory when the SA goes near them from mid-afternoon onwards.

an ideal job

Now that it's April our working hours have altered again, so that we finish at 6.00pm.  When I worked in the City eight until six seemed par for the course.  Nowadays it feels like hard work, especially on day one when it comes as a shock to the system.  There again, I am older than I was then, and while sitting at my desk looking at the collapsing share prices of companies my clients were invested in, when they came out with rubbish results, was highly stressful, it was not as physically exhausting as dragging hoses around and lifting dozens and dozens of pots filled with compost.  Also, working in the City I was habitually tired most of the time, in a low level sort of way, and learned to ignore it, helped by the knowledge that I was being paid ten times more for my efforts than I get nowadays.

One customer asked me if I'd worked there long.  I replied that I'd been there since 2003, which she declared to be a long time.  I asked whether she had been shopping there for a long time, and it turned out that she lived in the village and so had, although, as she said, our paths had never crossed.  I explained that I was only part time, and she said what a wonderful part time job it must be, since it would be so tiring to do it full time, and there were so many other things that needed doing, like running one's house, cooking, and ironing.  Ironing has truly never loomed very large in my list of things to do, but I agreed that it was indeed a very nice place to work part time, if you liked plants.

I don't have a good feeling about the tea room.  The owner has gone on holiday for the week, leaving a rota of staff members who are supposed to do the tea room each day.  Today's co-opted Nippy was not overly pleased, having already got a full workload before being given the additional task of running the tea room.  Nobody knew how the dishwasher worked, and nobody could work it out, not even the gardener, who is good with machinery.  The tea room conscript lacked any sense of ownership of the task, so trays tended to linger on tables or on the counter beside the cake, and her efforts to do all her other jobs as well meant that there wasn't always anybody behind the counter.  That doesn't look inviting.  If I'd been a customer wondering whether to have a cup of tea and some cake, and saw dirty crockery and no staff serving, I'd probably have decided not to bother.  At one point I found myself obliged to dispense bottles of apple juice and chocolate cake to two customers who promised they were not environmental health officers, in the course of which I managed to knock the cake tongs on the floor.  We need a dedicated staff member, at least during the hours when the plant centre is open.

I felt on safer territory with the plants, which are doing all sorts of delightful and interesting things at this time of year.  There is a Cytisus called 'Porlock' which flowers in a bright, soft shade of yellow, with a fresh, vigorous scent, and the yellow flowers of Magnolia 'Elizabeth' are just opening.  We have Japanese flowering cherries in almost every shade of pink, and a bright pink, double flowered peach which I think was got in as a special.  I held off buying plants, since I have a little backlog to plant out already, and can only do so much at a time, and the weather forecast is iffy for the middle part of the week.  Still, I was very tempted by a violet with white flowers speckled with blue, and the tray of Primula bulleyana.  They are not doing anything yet, but there is a damp patch down at the bottom of the garden that might support some candleabra primulas, once I've hauled the nettles out and the Systems Administrator has built the new deck at the back (to give a sheltered, shady place to sit on hot afternoons when there's a breeze from the southwest).

Addendum  The SA failed totally in the search of white Sandtex exterior gloss paint in Colchester.  There was none to be had in B&Q or Homebase, but an awful lot of tins of Parisian Pink.

day three in the plant centre

Today passed in part in an air of barely suppressed chaos.  One of my colleagues had booked a holiday, arranged with another colleague to swap working days to cover, and then changed her holiday dates.  The person she swapped with didn't realise that the dates had altered, so wasn't expecting to come in today.  The manager, detecting at the eleventh hour that we were about to be down to two people in the plant centre today, arranged for the woman who normally works on the other side but can operate the till to come in for an extra day as cover.  The owner decided to spend most of the day working in the shop so that she could run the tea room, and co-opted her twelve year old daughter to help with the teas.  In theory we had enough people for a Monday.

In theory we had.  But then the manager decided to leave the third staff member over on the other side, where she had more than enough jobs to be getting on with, and working with the owner is not as slick as when it is another regular member of staff.  I expect that's largely down to lack of practice, but I think it's also a difference in mindset.  It's her business and she employs us, so isn't used to the idea that if she wants to go to the office for ten or even five minutes at a point where she is minding the tills, she needs to tell us that she's going and then maybe wait until we've finished talking to a customer and can come and take over from her.  Several times today I went out of the shop leaving her there, and returned to find nobody from the home team except for the twelve year old, and a customer waiting at the till.  And the staff are accustomed taking it in turns to eat lunch, so that there will always be a minimum of two people on duty, one to operate the till and the other to help customers and answer the phone.  That's a bore for the person who goes last and ends up sitting down to their lunch at quarter to two, but it's necessary to keep things ticking over smoothly.  The owner, seeing a lull in trade, announced when the manager said he would go for his lunch that she would go for her's as well.  The lull didn't last.

Still, I'm pleased to see her out there.  Management by walking about is a very good way for anybody in charge to find out what is going on in a business, and it will be instructive for the owner to see how busy we get on the ground at this time of year, and how it is that phone calls get missed or plants not put out for sale the moment they are ready.

The dog added to the air of faint disorder by persistently coming into the shop, and walking around the kitchen and under the tables in the tea area, a would-be snapper up of unconsidered trifles.  The owner exclaimed each time that the dog was supposed to be in the house, and removed her, and the dog escaped from the house every time and was back in the tea room.  The daughter protested that the dog was not doing any harm and should stay.  The manager and I said that the environmental health inspector would not like it, if they dropped by and found a dog in the kitchen.  I heard the owner going through our operating procedures with the catering student yesterday, and whatever risk assessment form they were filling in said that they wore aprons.  It did not say that we had a dog in the kitchen.  One hopeful couple asked me if I could make them some tea, at a point where the owner was not there, but I had to tell them that I had not passed my food hygiene exam and had got compost on my shirt, and that while I ate my lunch in this state every day and hadn't died yet, I didn't think it would be acceptable for professional catering purposes.

The telephones have become practically inaudible at the top end of the plant centre, unless it was just my handset.  Incoming calls were very faint, and kept breaking up.  That's difficult at the best of times, but particularly so when you are trying to discover the name of the person calling, and the name of the plant they are looking for, as you can't fill in proper names from the context like you can with more general chit-chat.  Two of the three doors to the shop aren't working properly either, and the person from the door company the manager spoke to last week while the boss was in Cornwall was spectacularly rude and unhelpful on the phone.  As I said, it was a day of barely suppressed chaos.

One woman came into the shop with a pained air and said that there was nobody out there to help her at all, which was true, as I was on the till and the manager was at his desk telephoning orders for plants through to suppliers.  I offered to help, and she wanted some bare root quick thorn dug up.  I bagged up a bundle of ten hawthorn whips for her, and she and her husband began to quiz me about how large they would grow.  They were happy to hear that they would get to eight feet as required, and asked how quickly they would get there.  They were not happy with my reply, as it turned out they wanted them to get to that height this summer.  I explained that almost nothing newly planted would be likely to make that much growth in its first few months, and that we did have some large specimen evergreens suitable for screening, but that they would be much more expensive.  She said could I leave the hawthorn in its bag for now, as she'd probably have it anyway, and otherwise she'd let me know, but could she see the other plants as well, so I showed them some Italian grown Photinia x fraseri 'Red Robin' and pointed them in the direction of the bamboos.  Later in the day I thought to go and check that she had taken the hawthorn, and there it still was, sitting in its bag.  I heeled it in again.  When you next read an article in the Telegraph or the Times by some journalist grumbling about how awful, rude, ignorant, useless and unhelpful shop assistants are nowadays, remember that they have to deal with some pretty stupid and godawful customers sometimes.

I have been admiring the emerging new leaves on a larch that is reserved for somebody behind the shop.  At first they looked like tiny green pegs, on close examination like minute stubby bright green shaving brushes.  Today they were visibly longer than at the start of the weekend, morphing from stubs into needles.  They are extraordinarily pretty.

Now I have a whole six days to spend on our garden, with almost nothing booked in my diary.  Admittedly I have some domestic errands to run, some of which won't wait, but the weather forecast is favourable for outside work and I should get lots done.  I cross my fingers mentally when I say that, since the last time I had a run of intensive gardening planned I managed to ram a rose thorn into my knuckle at the end of day one, and spent the rest of the week with a partially useable and very painful hand the size of a potato, feeling totally zonked from the horsepill sized antibiotics.

gearing up for the rush

The labels weren't done for the Italian plants, so they stayed where they were on the grass at the back of the plant centre.  Most of them are in quite hefty pots, so I didn't entirely mind not getting involved in moving them. Instead I priced up and put out for sale the things we got this morning out of the back of the weekly travelling van, which were much smaller.

I really like being allowed to go and have a look in the van.  It visits garden centres between late winter and autumn, and is fitted with racks which are always stuffed with whatever is looking pretty at that moment, plus a slightly random selection of shrubs and climbers that can be useful for plugging gaps when we've run out of something.  A few weeks ago it brought pots of snowdrops, miniature iris and winter aconites in bloom.  Now it's got primroses and pulmonaria.  It is such fun poking around the shelves, to see what they've got, like a visit to Santa's grotto for plantaholic grownups.  We took strawberry plants, and little pots of garlic for those customers who neglected to plant their cloves back in the new year, and sweet pea seedlings, bleeding heart, white violets and lungwort.  The manager passed on the trays of mixed buddleias because he had some coming in anyway.  Then, after nearly nine years of working there, somebody finally showed me how to change the reel of labels in the price gun.

The tunnel over The Other Side is still crammed with plants that ought to be out for sale in the plant centre, and the manager was given the services of both gardeners for the day to help label them and tidy them up ready for sale.  It's a busy time of year in the garden too, and I don't think the young gardener was best pleased to lose an entire day from what he regards as his real job, in order to spend it stapling labels on to plant pots.  I was rather surprised not to be sent over to join them, but we were just busy enough that we needed two people in the plant centre all the time.  The phones kept ringing with the usual mixture of people with sensible and straightforward questions, irritating callers, and the plain weird.

It took a long time for the penny to drop, after I'd explained several times to one woman that we had medium sized packets of micorrhizae in stock at £5.99, but not large ones, and that the large ones had been £10.99 but I couldn't remember exactly how many grammes the large ones held, that what she was after was for me to offer to sell her two medium sized packets for the price of one big one.  Look, lady, if you want two medium sized packets then buy two packets.  I partly blame lazy newspaper columnists for encouraging this vogue for people spending relatively small amounts of money to start demanding discounts from hourly paid staff, or worse still waste everybody's time by going round and round the houses instead of making it clear that they are asking for a discount.  They don't go into Tesco and start asking the checkout staff if they can have two medium sized packets of steak for the price on one big one.

Another caller was completely unable to hear me.  I kept repeating who we were more and more loudly and slowly, until I had to go out of the shop because it was too disruptive, and she kept repeating that she couldn't hear me, she couldn't hear me at all, while not saying who it was she wanted to speak to, or asking who she had run.  This alternated between long silences and truly disgusting coughing.  Eventually I hung up. If she was a genuine caller she needed to try again and hope for a better line, but she didn't.

On the bright side, some of the regular customers were back, including a tall and perpetually amiable garden designer who gets a very generous discount despite never spending much, mainly because he is so cheerful and rather good looking.  He is also gay, so the boss needn't worry about the owner's generosity in the matter of discounts.  And I steeled my nerves to ring people about plants they had ordered a very long time ago, and had taken that long to come into stock.  A couple of people still wanted them, one had bought elsewhere but was awfully apologetic about letting us down, and the others were on answering machine.  I should really have done yesterday afternoon, but you need to be feeling well rested and quite brazen to summon the nerve to call people to tell them that if they still want that rose they ordered a year ago, it is finally here.

Somebody rang to enquire whether we had his Berberis georgii yet.  It would be very handy if only we could  find some somewhere, as by now the list of customers looking for it runs to half an A4 page of an Excel spreadsheet.  It had a glowing write-up in the Telegraph, ages ago, and today's would-be purchaser told me that there is a very fine one at Hyde Hall, which he and presumably some other customers had seen, but we can't find plants anywhere.

The cloud never lifted, despite optimistic weather forecasts first thing, and by mid afternoon it had got distinctly cold.  I think it was a fog off the sea, as one customer told me that her son in London reported bright sunshine there.  Driving home I heard there were hosepipe bans across swathes of southern and eastern England, as I feared there would be.  That will not be good for trade.  Looking when I got home at the map on the BBC website of exactly where the restrictions were, I saw that the Tendring Peninsular was still a little unrestricted island in a sea of bans, so I'm still OK in the garden at home.  Passing the end of our wood I saw that the neighbours have had a delivery of some sort of compost dumped on our land.  They have their septic tank on it, which happened before we bought the house, and we agreed that they could use the track to their tank for overflow parking.  More recently they, or somebody, has been using the edge of the track as a compost heap.  They denied all knowledge of this, but subsequently some branches of Magnolia grandiflora appeared in the heap at the same time that one vanished from their garden, so I don't think they were telling me the truth.  Now they, or somebody, is using it to store bulk deliveries of soil improver.  We are going to have to get on and fence the land off to stop the compost heap, and it would serve them right if we put a gate across the track at the same time, padlocked it, and didn't give them a key.

things are hotting up

When I got to work I discovered that they have finally done something about the muddy track across the back of the plant centre.  For years, in fact for the whole of the plant centre's existence, the route from the back of the shop to the loo and the office consisted of a desire line across a patch of grass, which wore away the grass and left a chain of puddles in wet weather.  The staff periodically lobbied the boss that we needed a proper path, because it looked awful, and because we were left shuffling around in the puddles if there were any plant deliveries after it had been raining.  The boss always harrumphed about this, and said that he didn't want a cowboy job, and it would get done properly at some point.  I have no idea if it has been done with proper foundations, but the gardener has cut away the damaged grass to form a broad, straight path, which is lavishly coated with fresh gravel.  It looks about a thousand times better.

The latest delivery of large specimens from Italy came in as well, on Friday, and is sitting on the grass at the back of the plant centre, half of it still tied up in net bags.  The manager left us a long list of things to do over the weekend, but removing the bags didn't feature until Sunday, and as we didn't manage to finish Saturday's jobs we never got on to de-bagging.  I felt sorry for the plants, which looked as though they could do with some more air, but one more day probably won't make a great difference.  And the first delivery of herbs had arrived since the last time I was at work, and some roses.

A cheerful and courteous man and his wife bought over £650 worth of plants, which helped swell the day's takings.  As I put the contents of their three trolleys through the till, which took some time, his wife fetched him a chair to sit on, and he explained without rancour that he had bad sciatica, and it was a damn nuisance.  His wife had vetoed his preferred treatment, which was for two beautiful women to walk up and down his spine, though he said she had offered to walk on it herself.  He asked to be remembered to the boss, and when I asked his name it turned out to be one of those great gardening names that are commemorated in a group of plants.  They'd driven up all the way from Sussex with a van.

Another customer rang to ask whether we sold spiral rabbit guards, and how much they were.  The answer was yes, and 50p each.  She said she needed quite a lot and would there be a discount?  Quite a lot translated to 20, which is quite a few tree guards, but still only ten pounds worth.  I don't think a tenner gets you a discount anywhere, certainly not with us.  The famous name from Sussex didn't get a discount, though when he enquired amiably if he could I did suggest he should speak to the owner.

The strategy of putting the large and expensive Edgworthia by the till finally resulted in a sale, as I remarked (apparently casually though really with intent) to someone who was admiring it that we had some smaller ones in the tunnel, and she went and got one.  I still think that there is only a limited amount that the staff can do to sell more.  We can help customers find plants they would otherwise miss, and suggest good planting combinations, or in this case offer temptation in the form of smaller specimens, £20 suddenly looking a bargain when the big one is twice that.  But in the end they come in with an idea and a budget, and all we can do is enhance things at the margins.  All of our wiles and strategems in the course of an entire week don't make as much difference as whether or not Mr famous name decides to make a trip up from Sussex with a van.

The day's takings were further boosted by a couple from Lavenham who bought £450 worth of plants, including seven trees, and overall we were busy, which is good, and what you'd hope for at this time of year.  In the morning I'll discover if we made any mistakes on the till.

things are hotting up

The warmer weather is bringing the customers back like migrating birds.  Some are regular visitors to the plant centre, commonly seen any time between spring and autumn.  Others are new sightings.  Some have made their way purposely to us in search of a particular plant, while others have the air of having just blown in and landed at random.  We greet the familiar faces, and try to be nice to all of them.

New plants are starting to arrive in quantities too.  The choice of herbaceous plants at this stage seems arbitrary.  We've suddenly got the full gamut of hollyhocks, some lupins, a few achillea, and for some reason Centaurea montana and Hesperis matronalis.  Delightful cottage garden plants, the last two, but scarcely the first names that would spring to mind if putting together a core range.  The glasshouse-fresh foliage, so different to the winter-burned leaves on plants growing outside, is designed to tempt.  Why else have a choice of half a dozen dwarf pinks, which won't start flowering for at least another month?  Pots of Fritillaria meleagris, brought on under cover, are blooming weeks ahead of the ones in the garden.  Bread-and-butter shrubs are starting to arrive too, variegated forms of Pittosporum tenuifolium and pyracantha.  To a plant enthusiast they are not nearly so fascinating as the twigs that came in last week, but they score far more highly as eye candy.

We had to do some watering, outside as well as in the tunnels.  We are out of practice after the winter break, hoses not in the right place, routes round the plant centre not honed to a precise routine.  It takes a few days to learn to split the watering with a new team member.  Initially you find dry patches that each person thought the other had done or would do, then with practice you develop the unspoken understanding that is a mark of all good teams, and everybody knows what the others are going to do without any need for discussion.

The manager had got us moving some of the shrubs that have over-wintered in the shelter of the tunnels back outside.  We weren't too sure how cold he was expecting it to be tonight, as he'd also left instructions for us to wind down the tunnel sides, tuck fleece over the agapanthus and turn off the pump and the water tank at the end of the day.  Turning off the irrigation fell to me, the other two saying they didn't know what we were supposed to be doing, so I hope I have clunked the correct lever and turned the right stop-cock, not being mechanically minded.

There were a couple of mystery plants to identify from samples.  One looked like an alder of some sort, but not the common one, unless it was from a specimen that was doing far better than any of mine.  The other looked more like some kind of Genista than anything else I could think of, though I was puzzled that the people asking had never noticed it flower.  They await the manager's verdict on Monday morning, as does the almost-but-not-quite dead Hydrangea quercifolia, that has gone backwards for two and a half years.  I wonder if two fierce winters separated by a drought sapped its will to live.  All will be revealed on Monday.

The sun shone and the birds sang.  Somebody brought in a gigantic and amiable black dog called Max, who wanted to smell everything, and thought that his owner's views on where she wanted to go need only have a very loose influence on his own progress.  At home Max likes to sit on the sofa.  She had to buy a second sofa.  If you like plants and people watching then an up-market plant centre is an entertaining place to be, in the spring.

creosote (substitute)

There was no frost last night.  I feel like a general fighting the last war, to have put the heaters on because there was a frost the previous night.  At least I remembered to switch them off this morning before leaving for work.

The smell of creosote substitute hung over the plant centre and permeated everything.  Occasionally I thought I detected a faint whiff of Sarcococca, but it was mostly creosote.  The herbaceous tables were dry enough for me to start replacing the pots that had been cleared off them so that they could be painted, so I cleaned up and moved Hemerocallis and iris, breathing the chemical stink as I did so.  I presume that creosote substitute is not so noxious as the real thing, which was pretty potent, and incidentally very toxic to cats.

The fuel for the tunnel heater is stored in an old container labelled - what else - 'creosote', which caused my colleagues a certain amount of head scratching as they set out to refill the heater.  They did put the right stuff in the tank.  There were three people working on painting the tables on Friday, and there are still five big containers of creosote substitute left in the pot shed.  When they're finished I guess that will be it for this year.

One of our customers today turned out to be a true, dedicated (not to say fanatical) gardener.  She bought a trolley full of shrubs and trees, which she seemed very pleased with, and it turned out that today was a red-letter day for her, and she was going out afterwards for a special lunch to celebrate.  She moved down here from Edinburgh, where she had a walled garden with perfect soil, and had spend four years struggling with her new garden, where nothing would grow.  She ended up removing vast quantities of builders' rubble and barrowing in twenty tonnes of topsoil.  Finally, she was ready to start planting.  Today's purchases were the first of the structural elements (although I did notice one hellebore had sneaked into her trolley) and as she departed, beaming, she promised that she Would Be Back.  It sounded like a long haul, and I gather there were some difficulties regarding access, and the neighbours.

The Systems Administrator suggested yesterday evening that maybe customers in January tended to be nice because the only people who come in at this time of year are the keen and knowledgeable ones.  Not so today.  (It is a good rule of thumb that when you greet anybody with a cheerful 'good morning' in the hour between noon and one o'clock, which still feels like morning if you have not yet had lunch, and they reply 'or afternoon', the conversation is unlikely to go well after that, because you are dealing with a picky so-and-so).  Today's pernickety old lady, pleasantries brushed aside, advanced on the till with a plastic bag containing a shrub, and announced that she had bought it a year ago and wasn't happy with it.  The shrub was a Spiraea, still with our label on it.  I asked what was wrong with it, and she said that it had never done anything.  I asked if the leaves had emerged normally, and she said that it had leaves and flowers on when she bought it.  She rummaged around in her purse for her receipt, and was surprised to find that she had bought it in July, and not a year ago.  You wouldn't expect to buy a Spiraea in full bloom in January.  I inspected the roots in the plastic bag, which looked absolutely fine.  Quite good, actually, as they had started to move beyond the confines of the original pot.  I scraped at a stem with my fingernail and, as I expected, there was green underneath.  I suggested as gently as I could that it was alive, and was in fact perfectly healthy, but she reiterated that she didn't like the look of it, and that her family hadn't liked it either.  I explained that as Spiraea were deciduous that was what they looked like in January, then played the 'weekend staff aren't allowed to give refunds' card, and we agreed that she would leave the plant with me so that the manager could look at it in the morning.

The owners' son rang up from his boarding school grumbling that he was bored.  I tried to be sympathetic, but really he ought to have been grateful that nobody was making him go for a cross-country run, or any of the hearty stuff they do at boarding schools.  After all, he could have been breathing creosote fumes and talking nicely to idiots.

a quiet day

We are finally going to have a computer out in the shop, so that we will be able to send e-mails about the availability of plants and suchlike without having to go up to the office.  They are going to lay a cable when they dig a trench for the drains for the new tea room.  Next spring.  Still, it's something to look forward to.

Somebody rang wanting advice about retaining moisture around the hundreds of trees she had planted this spring, and we had a long conversation about whether she could use the chippings from a large horse chestnut she'd had removed (undesirable, better to let them compost down first) and whether a mulch of mushroom compost would help (yes, brilliant stuff, use it myself, just don't pile it in contact with the trunks, and best to apply when the soil is less dry).  She has a bowser, and watered all the trees every week this summer, and couldn't face doing it again.  We got on to the properties of clay soil (some of the water in it is bound so tightly to the tiny soil particles that it isn't available for plants to take up, so they aren't necessarily all that drought resistant.  Mushroom compost will help over time) and how severe and widespread the drought was.  She went away sounding happy and said our chat had been very useful.  Unfortunately it won't result in a single extra penny through the till, at least in the immediate future.

Somebody else rang asking if we had any liquidambars, and I spent a long time describing what we had, and how big they were now, and how much money, and what colour their leaves went in the autumn.  Then he asked if we could send one, because he lived in Lincolnshire, and I had to explain that we could send the small plants by mail order, but not the ten foot trees.  He wanted a ten foot tree, because he said he didn't have that many years left, and that he was on dialysis, and getting to us would be difficult.  I felt very sorry that he had kidney failure, which I know is life-limiting even with dialysis, and leaves you feeling grotty, but I couldn't help him with the large trees.  They are too big to send by mail order.  The parcel company wouldn't and couldn't do it.

Somebody else rang asking if we could keep some reserved plants for longer, because she couldn't get over to collect them because her husband was ill.  It turned out that he was in hospital with pneumonia.  I promised I would make a note on the plants that she still definitely wanted them, but might be delayed collecting them, and told her that she had other things to worry about and should not worry about the plants.

I rang a woman who was down as wanting a fan trained apricot.  She sounded slightly surprised that she could have wanted such a thing, and explained that she wasn't well, and hadn't been for fourteen months because she'd had a bad fall, and she'd had to get somebody in to Do the garden, and the garden was a mess.  I suddenly realised that it was The Woman Who Wanted 16 Lavenders.  Then she told me how difficult the soil in her garden was, and how all the trees she planted in it died, and I thought she should probably not have a fan trained apricot.  I have seen the roots on these fan trained fruit trees, which we potted up ourselves, and they are teeny-tiny, not at all suitable for an elderly and ill lady with rubbish soil and dubious garden help, so I had to talk her out of having an apricot, at least this year.  It turned out that she was very pleased with the lavenders and believes that our plant centre is wonderful, which was nice.

A cheerful-sounding woman who lives near York was delighted that we could send her a crab apple whip by post.  She was one of the people I rang yesterday to let them know that their plants had arrived, and it hadn't been recorded on the paperwork that she lived at the other end of the country, although I had thought that I didn't recognise the dialling code.  Another person I rang yesterday came in today to collect her plant, but it was a Cornus that only cost £8.95.  And unfortunately not enough people thought we were wonderful, and we didn't take much through the till, despite our best efforts telephoning people.

The gardeners and the owner spent the morning cutting Christmas trees.  Due to past management, or lack of it, the trees grown on the estate are mostly rather tall and skinny.  This year some of them have grown a fine crop of cones, the first time I've seen them do that.  Because our house is split level (very 1960s) the sitting room rises to one and a half storeys high, so we like a tall tree, and the price of the trees at work is very reasonable, maybe reflecting the limited local demand for trees 4m high.  This leaves us with a nice decision to make, which I will put to the Systems Administrator, though maybe not this evening as the rich fruity cold, which had been showing signs of abating, has returned with a vengeance.  It is a bit earlier than I would like a tree, as they will have been cut for 20 days already by Christmas Day, and a fresh one nearer the time would be better.  The gardeners cut 30 trees today, more than we usually harvest.  If they sell well they may cut some more, and I can have one that was chopped down closer to Christmas.  If they don't cut more then we'll end up with one from this batch anyway, but the nicest ones will have gone and we'll be left with the oddly shaped, weird, and mutilated ones to choose from.  Games Theory is right up the Systems Administrator's street, so we could be in for a prolonged discussion of tactics.

The manager looked at the dead damson tree and said he thought it had been hit by a strimmer, judging by the horizontal line of damage in the bark.  The owner told me that I had done the right thing to stick to procedures.  They are going to give the horrible woman a free replacement tree anyway.  I knew they would.  I suggested to the manager that maybe we could have a list of customers to whom the normal rules don't apply, because they have spent a lot of money, or are friends with the owners, or big influential cheeses on the East Anglian dinner party circuit.  If they are going to get no-questions-asked replacement plants anyway, the staff might as well not bother trying to apply the normal procedure for returns, and be saved a distressing encounter.  The manager said that was a good idea.  It won't happen.

a considerable improvement

What a difference a day makes.  Today's customers were all perfectly polite and reasonable people.  Some of them were rather jolly.  The most cheerful of all were an elderly couple from north Norfolk.  She was bent almost through ninety degrees with some, presumably age-related, spinal problem, but her appetite for life and looking at plants appeared undiminished.  They were accompanied by two friendly dogs, which had not appreciated the drive from Norfolk, especially the delays on the A14, and now wanted to trundle about and smell as many interesting things as possible to alleviate the tedium of their day so far.  They were on extendable leads, of which they took full advantage.  One of them managed to wind its lead 360 degrees around my legs and a pillar in the shop.  The couple bought three trees, including a birch that was tall by our standards, and I was not entirely sure how I was going to get them into their car, but given they'd come all the way from Norfolk we agreed we'd find a way.  They opted to have the branches at the front end, so as to leave room for the wife's legs in the passenger footwell, which seemed the right choice given the state of her spine, and I was able to tie the branches of the birch together with string so that the husband didn't have to drive home with birch twigs covering half the windscreen.  One of the other trees was a ferociously spiny Crataegus, and I was worried about the dogs, which were going to have to share the back of the car with it.  The owners were far more sanguine, saying that they were sensible dogs and would keep clear.  The wife told me that in her younger days she had driven down the A12 with nine trees crammed into a Mini, branches poking out of every window.

Another couple had driven all the way from Sussex to collect half a dozen Pyrus calleryana 'Chanticleer'.  This is a handsome ornamental pear, making a fairly upright tree if left to its own devices, and carrying white flowers in spring and splendid leaf colours in autumn.  The species is from north America, though I have read accounts of planning officers whose dogmatic enthusiasm for native plants outstripped their plant knowledge, allowing planning applicants to plant 'Chanticleer', the Chaucerian name deceiving them into thinking that it must be an English tree.

A young girl called in to collect a Cedrus libani that she had been patiently waiting months for.  She was amazed that I could remember her name and what plant she had come to collect, so I didn't explain that this was partly because so few of our customers are under 35.  Actually, I doubt she's more than 30.  She has a beautiful smile, always looks cheerful, and is rather pretty, which are other reasons to remember her.  She is a florist, and wants the tree to supply greenery for flower arrangements, though she'll have to wait a few years before she can start harvesting, given that at the moment it's barely 45cm tall.

Everybody I rang to tell them that plants had now arrived that they had asked for, sometimes months ago, was either really pleased to be called because they still wanted the plant, or at least didn't mind being called.  A couple wanted time to think about whether they did still want the plant, which is fair enough but pushing the envelope of our information management system to the limit.  A colleague rang someone who'd been after Rubus odoratus, and they were with us that same afternoon.  It is disheartening when everyone you call has found the plant elsewhere, or substituted something else.  One woman I spoke to couldn't remember ordering a Ptelea trifoliata, or even remember what the plant was and what it did, but once I'd described it she said she'd have it anyway.  She must have a large garden, to be able spontaneously to fit in a 7m tall shrub.  Ptelea trifoliata is the hop tree, a pretty thing with greenish, hop-like scented flowers, and interesting fruits.  I have one myself I grew from seed, though it is not very happy in the lean sand along the edge of the wood, and I really ought to keep it free of weeds and generously mulched with mushroom compost to try and persuade it to grow a bit faster.

The owner rang the rude woman with the dead tree yesterday evening, and pacified her, though not to the extent of promising to replace the tree until the manager had seen it.  Faced with the choice between angering high spending customers and becoming a soft touch for giving out replacements, she came down on the side of firmness, but got her call in early, before the woman could go out that evening and blacken our reputation over the dinner tables of Suffolk.  Apparently she took the line that I could not have been expected to know that the customer had spent a lot of money, and explained our returns policy.  I tried to do that, but people like yesterday's awful woman probably listen harder when they are speaking to someone they identify as People Like Us, and not a shop assistant they have written off as a social inferior.  It remains to be seen whether the manager gives her a new tree anyway, even if he thinks the old one failed due to poor cultivation, and not through any fault of ours.  I wouldn't be surprised if he does, as a 'goodwill gesture'.  Pish to goodwill.  I've spent more than £500 with the Whichford Pottery in the past year, but I wouldn't expect a free replacement if I was stupid enough to break one of their pots shortly after purchase.

The owners were interviewing a shortlisted candidate for the plant centre job, and introduced him to those staff who were around.  He currently works in a garden centre, and would like to improve his plant knowledge, which he would certainly do working with us.  He told us some hair raising stories about their customers.  They get people bringing back dead plants bought from other nurseries and trying to claim a refund, even to the point of swiping labels from the stock in that garden centre and putting them on the plants from elsewhere.  Staff can spot this when it isn't the right label for that style or size of pot or plant.  Allegedly, some customers will even damage plants of the same variety as the ones they are buying, leave them there on the garden centre bed, then come back ten days later, pick up the wilted plants, and present them at the till with their receipt, claiming these are the ones they bought, as a scam to get free extras.  Thinking about it afterwards I wondered how the garden centre staff knew that was what customers were doing, and if it happened regularly or only the once.  I don't think most of our customers are that devious.  Loud shouty sense of entitlement is more their style.

I told the Systems Administrator about the awful woman with the dead tree, who said that she was probably married to the sort of person the SA used to work for.  'Dickhead fund manager working in Fixed Interest' was the exact phrase.

one bad apple

Most of the customers were perfectly nice today, and one was vile.  She had brought back a greengage that she said had never thrived.  She had planted an orchard, and in total spent around £500.  She wondered if the owner could tell her why her tree had died, naming the wife of the partnership by name.  She handed me the tree, and said it had been out of the ground for a bit.

Customers who choose to flag early in a conversation that they know the owners tend to be difficult.  I looked at the roots of the tree, and the customer's phone rang.  She answered it, and had a long conversation about (I dedeuced) the performance of some children in some competitive arena or other.  A long conversation.  Not a 'hi darling, I'm just with someone in the garden centre, call you in five minutes' sort of conversation.  I finished looking at her tree, and waited for her to finish her phone call.

I explained that the manager rather than the owner was the person to help with dead plants, and authorise replacements, and he would be in on Monday, if I could keep the tree and get him to look at it then.  I asked how the tree had been planted.  She said it had been planted the same as all the others, which were all fine.  She hadn't planted it herself.  I said that the manager was the expert, but to me the roots looked in good condition, while the bark had rotted at the base of the trunk, and looking at the soil marks on the stem, which seemed to go all the way up to the graft point, I wondered whether it had been planted too deeply.  She got very aggressive and very rude.  She didn't want to know why her tree had died at all.  She had spent five hundred pounds and wanted me to give her a new tree, no questions asked, and she was very disappointed by my attitude.

I stuck to my guns.  The rule of the business is that I am not authorised to give out replacements.  I am supposed to use my discretion if I think the customer has a genuine case, as we don't want to upset good customers, but I am not supposed to dole out free trees willy nilly to people who have managed to kill plants that were perfectly good when they left our nursery.  And she was very, very unpleasant.  Advice to any of you who haven't worked in the front line of a service industry, or are more accustomed to calling the shots than receiving them.  Try charm.  Try getting the staff on your side.  They will feel so much more inclined to bend the rules on your behalf than if you come at them like the cook bawling out the thirteen year old scullery maid.

Being offensive to shop staff or waiters who haven't been rude to you is one of the most pathetic forms of social interaction there is.  I once told a fellow (first class) commuter who was being gratuitously horrible to the guard on the intercity out of Liverpool Street about a broken carriage door to leave the man alone, since it wasn't the guard's fault the door was opening and shutting randomly.  The door was very irritating, but the guard was not responsible for maintenance of the train, and there was nothing he could do about it at that moment.  This did actually make the grumbler shut up, though I suppose in other circumstances it might have resulted in my being punched on the nose.  Picking on people who are not responsible for the problem and are not in a position to retaliate in kind is such a low form of behaviour.  Don't do it.  If any of your friends do it then rethink the friendship.  You don't want people like that in your life.  Social generalisations can be dangerous things, but I'm afraid that the rudest and most horrible customers do seem to come predominantly from the upper end of the middle classes.

All the other customers were pleasant to downright delightful, but one nasty person negates the beneficial psychic impact of twenty good, and I went home with a headache and neuralgia.  Tomorrow I'll find out if I should have just given the horrible woman a free tree.

assorted customers and an invention

Today was quiet and mostly civilised.  A couple called in to collect a Philadelphus that we'd reserved for them, and were really pleased that we'd rung to say we'd got the plant.  While they were at it they bought an early flowering yellow rose as well, Rosa banksiae 'Lutea'.  A customer I'd called yesterday because Prunus mume 'Beni -chidori' was in stock and she'd wanted one in the summer when we didn't have any rang back to say that she had sourced the plant elsewhere, but was grateful we'd taken the trouble to ring.  It is considerate of people when they do let us know that they no longer require a plant, since we can put the reserved specimen back out for sale.  'Beni-chidori' is a pretty thing, an ornamental tree from Asia with small, vivid cherry-pink flowers in spring.  The name means flight of the red plovers.

Somebody rang from Norfolk asking about the availability of various trees.  One of them I'd never heard of, and nor had the manager.  It was a narrow leaved form of the cockspur thorn, full moniker Crataegus crus-galli var. pyracanthifolia.  She said that it was a thoroughly good small tree, that formed a perfect umbrella shaped crown, which she'd had in a previous garden.  She'd bought her original tree from Hillier's nursery, but they no longer sell direct to the public, and the Crataegus wasn't in the Plantfinder at all, though it was in Hillier's dictionary of trees and shrubs.  I looked it up after our conversation, and it did sound very nice, so I said to the manager that if he ever saw plants offered by a grower maybe he should snap them up.  She was after the tansy leaved thorn as well, which we had, though smaller than she might have liked, and a flowering cherry and various other things, some of which we were expecting later in the autumn.  We ended up with quite an organised plan to assemble what plants we could get, so that she could send someone with a lorry to collect them.  From her voice I put her down as quite old, and quite posh, and she had a refreshingly clear grasp of how to order plants.  In the course of two conversations we'd established what we had, what we ought to be able to get, when that was likely to be, and how she was going to pay for them and get them to Norfolk.  I wish all our customers were as organised.  Compared with the Woman who wanted sixteen lavenders it was like dealing with a Mckinsey consultant.

It is frustrating when no grower propagates a good plant  variety and it isn't available for sale.  Of course, these are precisely the plants that a certain kind of gardener wants to possess.  If you are a plant collector making trips out to the wilds of Asia or South America, or friends with plant collectors, so that you can lay your hands on things grown from wild collected seed before they enter commerce (if they ever do), or are on plant swopping terms with other exclusive gardens, that marks you out as a certain type of gardener.  If you care about whether your garden contains commercially unobtainable rarities that marks you out as a certain kind of person.  We do have a few customers like that, but they always seem rather pathetic to me.  Better not to let on, if you are that way inclined, like getting a First while managing to give the appearance of not having done any work.

I spent the afternoon weeding the hardy geraniums, and ended up with back ache, again, from working on a bench that was too low, alternating with working holding the pot against my stomach with one hand, which left me with a black disc of compost on my uniform shirt.  Exasperated by the back ache (I don't really care about the shirt.  It's going in the washing machine, and if it comes out still looking grubby that's tough) I outlined my idea for a mobile potting bench to the manager, who said it was a really good idea.  That is what my fellow back ache sufferer said yesterday afternoon when I described it to her, having just thought of it.  The snag is that the boss will never bother to get the gardener to make one.  Highly paid office workers who have to sit down all day get special orthopoedic chairs, but lowly paid garden centre workers who have to stand up all day are just supposed to cope.  I developed the prototype in my mind as I pulled dead leaves off Hemerocallis.  It would be at the right height to work standing up, without stooping, narrow enough to only take up half an aisle in the plant centre so that customers with trolleys could pass if they insisted, with space on top to rest a pot and put down your secateurs and knife, a low back to stop pots being pushed off, a bin of compost at the right height to reach it for top dressing without stooping, and a bucket for prunings at one end, below the height of the worktop so that you could sweep prunings straight in.  It would have wheels at one end for moving it along the aisle, and legs at the other so it didn't roll around (and you only had to buy two wheels).  It could have a shelf underneath for collecting up any dead or suspect plants encountered en route.  Using my new trolley I could work at a sensible height, using both hands to manipulate leaves and operate the secateurs, instead of having to do everything one handed while using the other hand to hold the pot.  The idea has to be a sure-fire winner.  I need to persuade the Systems Administrator to make me a prototype, having worked out how high 'the right height' actually is.  I tried out the idea on the S.A. briefly when I got home, and have agreement in principle.  The size of scantlings could be an issue.  When the S.A. built the chicken house, all the frames and planks came out a size thicker than specified in The Golden Cockerel Book of Poultry Houses, and when it was finished we could barely lift it and I almost ruptured myself helping to get it out of the workshop (although it did probably save the chicken's lives when a tree fell on it).  The patent Cardunculus portable potting bench needs to be as light as is consitent with not actually disintegrating during use.  I don't want to swop back ache for a hernia caused by trying to move the potting bench about, and the boss will get cross if it scuffs up the gravel.

Sunday working

So there is no respite from the R3 Breakfast show on Sundays.  This morning we were told that somebody was an under-rated composer, and invited to contact the programme saying whether we agreed, and that somebody else had possibly reinstated the guitar as the equal of the violin or cello.  Did we consider this to be the case?  Do please let R3 know via their website, and at 8.30am there will be a phone-in.  The tough choice facing us this evening between Downton Abbey and Spooks was mentioned (no, I won't be watching either programme) which led clunkily into the intro for a piece of Elgar.  Some Mendelssohn was said to be wonderful.  I never heard of Clemency Burton-Hill until yesterday, and her chirpy, determinedly let's not be elitist and instead make classical music accessible to the masses tones have already joined those of Ed Balls, Patricia Hewitt (nowadays mercifully silent), David Starkey and Nicholas Parsons introducing Just a Minute, as something to be avoided at almost all costs.  Except that the alternative at 7.30 on a Sunday morning driving to work is assorted dreary theologians.  And I used to really like R3 first thing on a Sunday.  Bother. Indeed B****r.

Work was moderately busy, as was yesterday.  Trade overall is rather subdued, and very lumpy.  Watering is a challenge as some plants are sopping wet, while others are bone dry.  We did our best to cater to each according to its needs, but inevitably some dry pots slipped past us.  I had left my wellingtons in the hall at home, which I realised as I got out of the car at work and couldn't find them.  Fortunately I avoided watering my feet.  I normally do water them, so wonder if there is an element of risk compensation when I have boots on, and if I am more careful when I don't have boots, or any dry shoes to change into.  But it might have been a matter of luck, and which lance I had.  I have got new Wellingtons, since the left boot of the old ones split over the toe and allowed water to pour in, even just walking through wet grass.  The new boots have got rather meaty treads, which seem to pick up a lot of gravel, mud, and anything else that's going.

I finished weeding and tidying the hostas and epimediums, and made a start on the hardy geraniums.  It's amazing how quickly they get weedy.  I remember doing all of them, not so many weeks ago.  It will soon be incorrect to compare weeding them to painting the Forth Bridge, since I saw on the news recently that they have painted that with a new weather resistant paint which is expected to last for ages between applications, so we will have to think of a new cliche.  By the end of the working day I had a large circle of mud on my stomach, from resting the bases of pots against it, and back-ache, from working at a bench that is critically too low.  My colleagues equally reported back-ache, though we all seemed to have it in different places.  I'm a low back sufferer myself.

There have been a lot of regular customers in over the weekend.  One of them today (with the ailing brother in London, who is stone deaf without her hearing aids but today she had them in) said how much she enjoyed the whole experience of visiting us.  It's good to hear that.  The contrasting cases of the two old ladies who called in yesterday is a fascinating study.  One of them is tiny, with visible osteoporosis, and is always extremely polite and very grateful for any help.  She has charmed all the staff, and gets a great deal of help.  If she wants a particular plant and the ones we have in stock are not awfully nice, we will order a few new ones rather than try to flog her an old one, and if she wants anything that might be hidden away behind the scenes we will run and look for her.  Her enquiry about plants with particular names, for a memorial garden, sent somebody trotting up to the office to consult the on-line Plantfinder.  Beyond being scrupulously polite, she never gives the impression that she wants us to like her.  The other old lady is about equally tiny, though less fragile.  She has the habit of buying things, taking them home, not liking them when she sees them in situ, and bringing them back.  She somehow gives the impression of being lonely, and wanting to be liked, while not always behaving like a proper customer, going and finding her own plants on the reserve bed, and trying to queue jump with queries.  The unfortunate result of her apparent neediness plus failure to quite observe the boundaries is that she is not liked, and members of staff try to leave somebody else to serve her.  One former colleague was reduced to going and hiding in the staff room.

oh the dreadful wind (though not rain)

The wind really arrived today.  The plant centre was a mess of fallen pots, and we didn't try to run the automatic irrigation, as even if the pots had been the right way up, the water would have blown away before it hit them.  We watered some things by hand, and the others were left to wait until the wind dropped.  We didn't bother picking up the plants that had tipped up, since they would only have blown over again, each time with a fresh chance of breaking themselves, or squashing something else in the process.

We got off to a slightly chaotic start staff-wise.  One of the part timers left a couple of months ago, after only about eighteen months with us.  (Since I am sure she never reads this blog, I will risk venturing the opinion that it was no great loss, as she wouldn't do her fair share of the watering, refused to lift anything as large as a bag of compost, and didn't seem very keen on nursery work generally.)  We almost covered the gap in the rota by agreeing that a former member of staff, who has been with the business practically since it started, off and on, would come back for three days a week.  This left just one problem, which was that every other Saturday there were only two members of staff on duty.  Two people is really not enough at this time of year, and so the manager has been plugging the gap on an ad hoc basis, which I presume we will continue to do until winter arrives and two people are plenty.  He worked one Saturday himself, and the plan for next Saturday was for somebody else to do it, and take today off instead in lieu, and for the woman who normally works over on the other side to come in today so that there were three of us.  Unfortunately, the person doing next Saturday completely forgot that she was supposed to take today off, and came in as normal, so there were four of us.  The manager was worried that the boss would be cross to see four of us there, trade being as it is, and after much discussion she went home again.  I thought she was remarkably nice about it.  Granted, it was her mistake coming in, but she agreed to alter her working days in the first place to help the business out, and Saturday working is a pain, given that social stuff tends to happen then.  Indeed, irregular working patterns are a nuisance.  At least with set days each week you know what invitations you can and can't accept, and your friends and relations know when you are free (at least in theory.  Some of mine have still not mastered the concept of every Monday and every other weekend after five years.)  If I had got to work and discovered that I was not wanted on voyage, and that my efforts levering myself out of bed at six in the morning and burning a couple of quid's worth of petrol (more at current prices) shlepping up to Suffolk and back had been all in vain, I wouldn't have been so good-natured about it.

The manager was very cross to get a phone call from somebody enquiring whether we had a particular Viburnum in stock and if so whether it was in good condition, as a friend of her's had visited us yesterday and been very disappointed that there were plants lying down, and that many of them had yellowing leaves.  The manager explained to her that yesterday had been windy, and that unfortunately pots did blow over, and that as it was the second week of September leaves were starting to die back and look a bit tired.  Then he grumbled about her to me, and then to my colleague drafted in from the other side.  A problem shared is a problem multiplied.

I had just started my lunch break and the phone got very busy.  After a while the boss came over the radio, asking whether any of us could get the phone.  The manager replied that he was with a customer, and I was at lunch.  I kept quiet, but I thought that if you require your staff to help customers in the plant centre, and operate the till, and answer the phone, and you only have three of them, one of whom doesn’t do phones, then when it gets to lunchtime there may not be enough staff to do everything.  You had a fourth member of staff first thing this morning, but she was sent home.

The day’s takings were further depressed by somebody returning two moderately expensive conifers, that she had decided were not suitable, and that what she needed was fastigiate yew.  She had agreed with us over the phone that she could return the conifers.  I think there were several conversations, and I know I was party to one of them, in which I politely suggested that if she didn’t want the plants we would prefer to have them back sooner rather than later, so that we could try and sell them to somebody else.  I think she would have like to save herself a drive and hold on to them until we had the yew, but that might not have been for weeks or months, so I was pleased to see the conifers.  They were in very good condition, so she had clearly kept them well watered, and I forgave her the fact that she had cut the prices off the labels before deciding she didn’t want them, and the manager had to faff about in the office finding out how much they were, and we will have to print new labels.  Some customers who change their minds about plants bring them back in miserable condition, obviously believing that if it’s only a few days then the plant won’t need watering.

The wind didn’t drop all day, and I was rather relieved when it was quarter past five and I could go home.

an unexpectedly busy day

Day Two in the plant centre turned out to be more successful than I was expecting.  The gale force winds that had been forecast didn't materialise (though I think they are coming, listening to the shipping forecast on the way home) and while it was a bit breezy, not too many pots blew over.  And trade, after an incredibly slow start, picked up so that we ended the day at quite a respectable total.  True, we were helped by one customer who bought three multi-stemmed birch trees and spend over five hundred quid, but even without her the day's takings wouldn't have been a disgrace.

I pushed on with the display tables, and managed to redo another half dozen, though the shortage of suitable plant material had not miraculously remedied itself in the night, and I felt distinctly gravelled for lack of matter.  Customers bought things out of the ones I'd already done, which at one level was very gratifying, and at another a nuisance as I had to scrabble around looking for substitutes to plug the gaps.  Two plants of a silver leafed dead nettle went, to two different customers, and that was almost certainly down to the display as they hadn't attracted any interest in days, stuck in alphabetical order between the Kniphofias and the Leucanthemums.  My colleague who was tidying the roses yesterday kept a tally of each rose we sold, and got quite excited when he hit ten.  I think we were supposed to keep it up for him today, but I forgot.  Tidying plants and presenting them attractively can induce customers to buy them, even though a good gardener sets out with a list, or at least a clear idea of the spaces they wish to fill, and should not be swayed by such temptations.  I might have been tempted myself, though I have not yet done the deal, but I was very taken with a soft orange shrubby potentilla, which I feel could usefully go somewhere near the 'Hot Chocolate' roses and purple leaved Cotinus (bits of the Cotinus are dying.  I am rather peturbed by this).

I spent a long time with a customer who wanted an unusual evergreen, not too big, to give to her neighbours as a 50th anniversary present.  An added complication was her wish to spend what she judged an appropriate amount of money, around £15, so while she was very taken by a small leafed form of Pittosporum tenuifolium, with silvery leaves that contrasted beautifully with the black stems, it was slightly cheaper than her ideal.  We took a long time looking at other things, before she settled for the Pittosporum anyway.  The time spent with customers is only weakly correlated with how much they actually spend.  The one who spent over five hundred pounds chose all of her own plants, without any input from us at all.

Yesterday was the annual sponsored bicycle ride in aid of the Suffolk historic churches.  The owner had bicycled to seven different churches in three hours, after spending the morning on duty in the village church, and was pleased with her efforts.  Today we inherited most of a box of mixed biscuits for the staff room, left over from the refreshments for the participants.

After the close of business we all went to see Eric the rooster.  The owner said that Eric was not at all vicious, and she thought that when he ran at the gardener this was not with the plan of attacking him, but because he wanted a cuddle, and possibly to be saved from the peacock.  Poor Eric, the misunderstood rooster.

service with a smile

Waking up when the alarm went off at six and realising that I was due to spend a day in the plant centre with a cold was not a moment of unalloyed joy.  Still, it is probably safer to be sub-par in charge of plants than if I were still having to make decisions about the ramifications of the Eurozone crisis.

We were peacefully watering when at 9.15am the phone rang.  I answered it, and it was The Lady Who Wants 16 Lavenders, which made two moments of not unalloyed joy in one morning.  She and I have a history going back about 3 weeks.  She spoke originally to a colleague of mine, who palmed her off on (sorry, passed her on to) me, on the grounds that I was going to be at work the next day and he wasn't.  He did warn me she sounded dotty.  She wanted some lavender for a hedge, but didn't know how many plants, so he told her the correct spacings and left her to measure the length of hedge, work out the number of plants and call me the next day.  I was then to call the supplier and place the order.  I never get involved in ordering, so the supplier has no idea who I am, but my colleague thought it would be fine.  The Lady rang me the next day and said she wanted 16 plants.  My colleague had already quoted her a price, which seemed to me unwise when we didn't know how large the plants would be or how much they'd cost us, but I couldn't help that.  I assured her that we would honour my colleague's quoted price, assuming we could get plants in 1L pots, and rang the supplier.

The woman I had been told to ring said she didn't know if they had the plants, and she would have to speak to somebody called Carl and check.  I asked her if she could ring me back to confirm the plants were available, and she said she would, and didn't.  The next time I saw my colleague I updated him on progress to date and gave the paperwork back to him.  The next week The Lady Who Wants 16 Lavenders rang me again, to find out about the whereabouts of the lavenders, and I had to apologise and explain that I knew no more than when I last spoke to her.  It transpired that her gardener had hurt his back, and we had a very confusing conversation at the end of which I though we'd established that she definitely wanted the plants, but wasn't sure when given the lack of a gardener, and that we would try to get the plants for her with no obligation, and if she decided she couldn't take them we would just put them into general stock.  I thought that was pretty good of us, given that lavender is a tricky thing to nurse through winter in a black plastic pot and get looking nice for sale come next spring, and we didn't especially want 16 of them for stock.

She rang again this morning to say that her gardener was now better, and she wanted to place an order for the plants, which is what I thought she did last Monday.  She wanted to know when the plants would be in, and I apologised and explained that I would have to find out and ring her back, as I only worked part time and hadn't been at work at all since the last day we spoke, so didn't know until I'd checked if we were able to get the plants.  I don't know if she had expected me to be there 24/7, working on sourcing her lavenders, but she seemed to find my ignorance quite incomprehensible.  I promised her I would find out.  As soon as the call ended I asked the manager, who seemed not to know anything about it.  Three quarters of an hour later the phone rang again, and it was The Lady Who Wants 16 Lavenders.  She had been engaged on another call, she explained, and thought I might have been trying to call her back.  I began to feel as though I were being slowly engulfed by an octopus.  I apologised that the manager had been busy with a lorry load of irises that had just arrived (which was almost true, though actually it was just two dutch trollies), and suggested that as I only worked part time and was not going to be in again until the weekend, and given that the manager did the ordering, it would be best if I were to give her the manager's name as a point of contact.

As I was finishing my mid-morning cup of tea, and the manager was just starting his, there was a phone call for him.  It was the Lady Who Wants 16 Lavenders.  I had tried to warn him.  I must speak to my colleague when I next see him, and suggest (forcefully) that he should not involve me in any more customer orders from suppliers.  I can't keep track of what's happening when I'm sometimes not in for a week at a time, and it makes us look unprofessional, and causes me more stress than I think my hourly rate warrants.  If I wanted stress I could still be paid to worry about the Eurozone crisis.

The phone rang again.  It was a sweet-sounding old (from his voice) boy who had bought a long handled brush for cleaning the cracks between paving stones, made by my least favourite tool company.  The first time he used it the handle fell off, and when he looked at it the head had only been held on to the shaft by a staple.  I looked at the ones in the shop and sure enough they were only stapled on.  He lived quite a way away, and didn't really want to have to drive over to bring it back.  I decided that he was genuine and gave him a refund over the phone.  In fact, it would have been a simple task to put a screw in to hold the head and handle together, but only if you had a drill, and a screw, and a screwdriver, and either strong hands to hold the work while you drilled or else a vice, and he may not have had any of those things, and anyway why should you have to mend something you have just paid £9.95 for that broke the first time you used it.

Then I went and potted irises, which was restful in comparison.

end of an epic

Some of the predictions came true.  Watering my trousers probably doesn't count, as I always end up watering them, and I could have done it on purpose.  Three separate sets of would-be garden visitors wanted free entry because they were RHS members, and on being told that sadly the concession did not apply on Sundays one said crossly (and incorrectly)  that it didn't say so in the handbook.  Somebody wanted to buy a terracotta trough that had lost its price, and was the only one of that design.  With the customer's agreement a colleague and I invented a price, based on another planter of similar size.  We went for three quid under the marked price, on the basis that the one with no label was older stock, and the punter was content.  We didn't actually run completely out of pound coins, but were low on them, and towards close of play I had to make up six pounds in change mostly from 50p coins, after having to juggle five pound notes between tills earlier in the day.

The dog absconded, or at least we heard the owners' son shouting her name for quite a long time in the garden, before seeing him marching back towards the house with the dog firmly clasped under one arm.  After we had all gone home she disgraced herself by rolling in some fox shit.  The owner couldn't face bathing her last night, and the dog spend the night locked in a cage in the kitchen.  This morning their son was prevailed on to give her a bath, and the owner said that all her bedding would have to go through the washing machine.  It may be one of the things that distinguishes a true countrywoman from a townie, that the former considers it entirely normal to put fox crap encrusted dog blankets through the same washing machine she uses for the family's laundry.  The latter probably doesn't.

The manager returned from his holiday, which was apparently very nice.  It was a pity that after half an hour of watering we lost pressure, and that the reason turned out to be that the tank was empty.  I fear this confirmed his view that we are a rather hopeless lot requiring constant supervision.  I have no idea why the tank failed to fill overnight, as it had been working perfectly well all the time he was away.  Once he restarted the pump that takes water from the pond in the garden, and connected the top up hose from the outside tap, the tank began to fill remarkably quickly, and we were soon watering again, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.  Psychological research does show that the beneficial effects of a holiday only last for a week or two.  I fear the manager may fall into the one week category.

The hose that was leaking and that the gardener mended before sprang another leak, and now has two jubilee clips holding the bits together.  My colleague worked out why it kept perforating (or at least formulated a good working hypothesis) which was that given something on the polytunnel door had come loose or undone, exposing a sharp piece of metal on the underside of the door, the hose could be getting caught under the door and ripped while watering in the tunnel.

Our misdemeanours in the plant centre were dwarfed by that of the younger gardener, who unfortunately let the tractor run out of oil.  An engineer arrived in a van, and spent the afternoon working on it, and  I fear that the bill for repairs is going to be a hefty one.  The gardener works very hard and is generally good at his job, and that was an unlucky way to get caught out.  Deprived of their tractor the gardeners did at least have the digger to play with, and the list of plants to be removed grew beyond just the infected stumps, as the boss began to consider which shrubs and bits of hedge might not be garden worthy.  There is something rather intoxicating about having a digger on the premises.  You can make so many changes so quickly.

dog days of august

It was back to work after my day off.  Overnight rain and the sterling efforts of my colleagues yesterday meant that there wasn't much watering to do, which made a pleasant change.  As the rain lasted on into the morning I took advantage of the early lack of customers and the shelter of the climber tunnel to disentangle some more of the clematis, which was on my list of jobs to do.

By eleven we'd only had about two customers, and I began to think that if it carried on at this rate then even though August is generally a quiet month, we were going to be in serious trouble.  After a late morning flurry trade died again in the first part of the afternoon, before a final small burst late on.  We were all surprised (in a good way) at the final total on the tills.  It is the height of the holiday season, though, and gardens are at their blowsiest, and who is really thinking of serious planting schemes?  At this time of year we are largely selling impulse fixes of colour, Salvia, Verbena and Crocosmia in full flower.  It pays to plan ahead, though.  A pot of C. 'Emily McKenzie' or 'George Davidson' will set you back £9.50, whereas if you had planned ahead and bought corms back in the spring you could have got them for 32p each.

A regular customer, who is actually a keen and year-round gardener, bought a couple of pots of Salvia.  They were an astonishingly lovely shade of blue, and I can see why she fell for them.  Then she began to tell me about her brother aged 87, living alone in Hampstead Garden Suburb in poor health, who had been a twin as she had herself, but their twins were now dead, before explaining that she was chronically deaf and currently between hearing aids, and interupting herself to say that she didn't know why she was telling me all this.  Deafness is so isolating.  It is difficult to embark on a serious discussion of human values and family duties when you have to bellow at somebody, and I stared at her rather helplessly.  I knew why she was telling me all this, but the communication barrier was too great.

The peahen and her chick were foraging around the plant centre.  The chick appears to be thriving.  It is darkening in colour as it grows, and already has a tiny peafowl style tuft on the top of its head.

Overall I wouldn't say I was actively bored, but the time did pass a bit slowly.  But at least I had a watch to monitor its passing (Google are still firing adverts at me.  It will be interesting to see how long the penny takes to drop).

Now the neighbours are using their field to host Sian and Adam's wedding reception, which has a noisy and not awfully attractive disco.  I don't know Sian and Adam from Adam, but hope that they are friends or relatives, and that the neighbours have not taken up renting out the field as a commercial sideline.  It is almost certainly just a favour to somebody they know.  They did one last year for a cousin, and after dark released those wretched Chinese lanterns. It was during a really dry spell, and I felt a mean relief as I saw that the wind direction was not carrying them over our property.

it could be a long week

Today was the start of a marathon stint at work.  I agreed to do some extra days to help cover while the manager is on holiday.  This was arranged about two months ago, when August appeared a long way off, and I don't think I can really have been concentrating as he ticked boxes on the staff rota, but the effect when you add the extra days to my normal working pattern is that I'll be at work for seven days out of the eight between now and next Monday inclusive.  Oh well, I expect I'll cope.

My usual road to work had re-opened and the evil, tyre-destroying potholes filled in.  Given they only patched the edges, and didn't resurface the entire lane, I don't entirely understand why it was shut for five days last week, but as it only inconvenienced me for one of them I don't really care.  Driving home, a normally OK right hand turning was rendered unsafe by a van illegally parked in front of the used-car dealership on the Harwich road.  It isn't the first time that's happened, and I really ought to complain to the council, or the police community support officer, or somebody.

(I did get organised to complain to the council about the proposed closure of the dump, and got an official reply saying that my comments have been noted and will be fully considered before a final decision is taken later in the year.  I don't suppose my comments will make a blind bit of difference, but for anyone else who wants to give it a go, your man is Councillor Kevin Bentley, Cabinet Member for Economic Development, Waste and Recycling, at the Cabinet Office, PO Box 11, County Hall, Chelmsford CM1 1LX.  Musing on what else they could cut instead of front line services I noticed that Colchester Borough and Braintree District Councils have just decided not to pursue the option of a joint Chief Executive or shared management.  Colchester's total net revenue budget for 2010-11 is £25.67m according to their website, and Braintree's is £14m according to an Executive Leadership Case Study they published which was the quickest thing I could find on the internet.  That's a combined annual budget of £40m, then.  Makes you wonder how Tesco manages its annual sales of £67,573m with just the one Group Chief Executive).

Apparently yesterday was busy at work, and we did OK today for a Monday in August (I think).  A kindly woman wanted ideas for plants with Pearl in the name, as a present for a friend called Pearl, and using the RHS on-line plant finder my colleague came up with a couple of camellias, which she bought.  It is customary to proclaim in your Mission Statement that you wish your customers to be delighted, but I think she really was.  She said we were the only nursery she used where she would get such service.

My colleague also had a good and intelligent idea for a low-cost, targeted way to market ourselves to large gardens.  Having expressed my complete approval for this plan, I had to take a turn calling large gardens and asking for the names and email adresses of their head gardeners.  Responses were mostly kind and helpful, one very suspicious and sniffy.  I am glad my job does not normally entail cold-calling, it must be quite soul-destroying.  I should be more compassionate when people cold-call me, except that they have chosen to work for boiler room scams and double glazing companies that ignore my stated wishes according to the telephone preference service.

It was very nice having a working watch, and I got a little glow each time I looked at my wrist, and saw the red strap, and red second hand ticking funkily away.  Buddhists who teach that material possessions do not bring true happiness ought to try going to work and keeping track of the R4 schedule for 3 weeks with no watch, and then they would admit that some material possessions bring, if not true happiness, then quite convincing false contentment.  An unfortunate side-effect of my quest for a watch has been that Google has worked out that I wanted one, but not yet clocked (ha!) that I have got one, so every other page of every newspaper site I look at now contains ads by Google for Swiss Railway watches.  They'll get over it, I suppose, like the time when I was briefly pursued by ads for Denby pottery (grunge china, as a former City colleague so uncharmingly described it).

Getting into the car at 5.20pm I deduced from the fact that the news had already got on to the London riots that the world financial system had not yet gone into total meltdown.  There was some not very sensible discussion of whether governments or markets were in charge, which missed the point.  Markets are signalling mechanisms, and I reckon they are signalling, firstly that Standard and Poor's are utterly useless and irrelevant, and secondly that the Euro is unworkable and is not going to last.

quiet, too quiet

It was another blustery day, too lively on the weather front and too quiet as regards customers.  The manager is beginning to wear the stressed and haunted look of someone with family and financial responsibilities, working in a sector that is under the cosh.  If you add up the retail failures of the past year it is not a reassuring prospect.

One of my colleagues had tidied up the small Edwardian greenhouse at the back of the plant centre, so I took advantage of the space to clean up yet more herbaceous plants under cover, out of the wind and drizzle with a proper work bench at a sensible height, and my prunings not blowing half way across the plant centre instead of landing in the bucket.  It is much more comfortable and productive than trying to weed and deadhead the plants one-handed, while using the other hand to hold the pot against my stomach, which is how I end up working half the time.  As I weeded I mused on how we could bring in more customers.  Yesterday's coach party was a welcome boost.  I would like us to contact as many garden clubs in Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Herts as we can find, and invite them to include a stop at the plant centre when they're planning their summer excursions.  I would target these counties because they are within reach for a day trip, so people who had been once with a tour and been impressed could return under their own steam.  Happy customers from Wales and the north of England are very nice, but they aren't likely to turn into regular visitors.  I don't know how you find the contact details of all those garden clubs, but I would start with the RHS to see if they can supply a list of affiliated societies, and then I guess sit down with a road atlas and start shoving the names of likely looking villages into Google.  I would try and build up the exisiting mailing list of individuals as well, by offering existing customers some sort of deal in return for the names of their garden-loving friends, who could have a deal as well.  It seems to work for Boden.  I'm convinced that even in a difficult retail climate there are people out there who would shop with us, if only they knew we existed.  Reducing the number of days the casuals work, and delaying replacing the person who left recently, conserves a tiny bit of cash but doesn't really get us anywhere.

I mused too on the futility of trying to organise other people's gardens.  Two of yesterday's customers were another mother and daughter pair, but not a happy and collaborative one.  The mother presented me with the problem in her daughter's garden, that of a large patch of dry shade.  I showed them to the tunnel where we keep the shade loving plants.  Mahonia was rejected because the daughter already had one of those, and Ma didn't like the suggestion of Fatsia either.  Would it survive another winter like the last one?  I replied that she hadn't told me that guaranteed hardiness to withstand a once in twenty years cold winter was required in addition to drought and shade tolerance  Mother was a thin woman with a hard face, daughter a podgy one who displayed minimal interest in her own garden.  I made a few other suggestions, including Sarcococca, and the thought that if the shade were really very dark and dry then a nice statue might be the answer.  They thanked me and let me get back to the coach party.  The next time I saw the daughter she hadn't chosen any plants, and was looking at things in the gift section of the shop with much more enthusiasm than she had shown for anything growing outside.  It seems to me not merely futile but counterproductive to take command of any garden except your own, unless you are a professional and the garden owner has made the conscious choice to subcontract the problem in exchange for money.  The unenthusiastic garden owner just feels even less sense of ownership and involvement at the end of the exercise than they did before, once their friends or relatives have tried to boss them around.

Tidying the Hemerocallis I found that some of them had made small plantlets mid-way up their flowering stems.  I snapped these off the stems (not spoiling the flowers) and potted them up, a trick I tried last year and got a very high strike rate.  Free plants are hard to resist, and if I don't use the shoots as propagating material they will only be thrown on the compost heap when the stems are cut down after flowering.  Last year's haul yielded me several 'Chicago Knockout', which have made good sturdy plants, and a couple of 'Eleanor', which are still rather small but are growing.  This year I got a 'Lemon Bells', a 'Joan Senior' and four 'Pink Damask', three of which already had one little root at the base of the sideshoot so should be fine.  We'll see if they take.  I've put them in the greenhouse inside a propagating case to conserve moisture, but another hot spell could simply cook them.

The day dried out briefly over lunchtime, but in the middle of the afternoon it rained torrentially.  It was a monsoon.  A river ran down the middle of the climber tunnel and a small lake enveloped the shade structure.  After the rain had passed and the puddles began to drain away there were tide marks in the car park, where the fallen flowers from the lime trees had been swept up.  When I got home I discovered that the rain had made it on to the national BBC traffic news, and that the A12 had been shut on the Essex-Suffolk border.  At home we hadn't had any, and the Systems Administrator had been able to sand off another section of the front of the house, and let the chickens out for a run.

another damp day

I was hoping that the boss would print out the labels for a delivery of plants that arrived last week, then I could have put them out for sale, using the in-bloom hydrangeas to jazz up some of the display tables.  Quite a few of them were things customers had been asking for, so I could have reserved those and rung the customers to let them know their plants were now here.  But the boss had other ideas of how to spend Sunday, so that didn't happen.  I hope he does the labels tomorrow.  I want to buy one of the shrubs myself, a Colutea which has had a place marked for it with a cane in the long bed for months.

Instead I weeded the Tradescantia.  They have pretty flowers, but the plants after flowering become such a mess that I don't see how you could use them, except in the wilder bits of a large garden.  Then I wandered about dead-heading the dahlias and day lilies.  Dahlia buds are rounded and face downwards, while spend flowers are elongated and held facing upwards, and if you touch them with bare fingers they always feel slimy.  Then I started on the Kniphofia, but it began to rain.  I'm not madly keen on working in the shop, but it beats standing in the rain weeding the herbaceous section, so I volunteered to fetch an order of birdfood and sundry garden items from the shed where it had been stacked after delivery, and price it up.  I count the colleague who is now back in charge of the shop as a personal friend, so don't mind helping her out with shop stuff.

Things got lively after lunch as a coach party arrived (we were expecting them).  They were keen to use the loos, and to have a cup of coffee, but quite a few of them did do some shopping as well.  We were struck by the sad sight of a group of chatting around one table, while a solitary old lady sat all alone at the other, until her companion appeared with a trolley load of plants, and it turned out that they were mother and daughter and nothing to do with the coach party.  The accomplished lady gardener from the village (who gave me tea from a silver pot the day I delivered her tree stake) pitched up in the middle of the coach party shopping spree, and we talked about the merits of early music, so one way and another we had a busy couple of hours.

Once it all quietened down again I returned to the boxes of bird food.  I am baffled that somebody thought it necessary to label the box of dried mealworm tubs NOT FOR HUMAN BEING.  Would it occur to anybody to eat mealworms?  Though some food experts on R4 were confidently predicting the other day how we would all be eating insects soon for the protein, so maybe it would.

Addendum  On getting home I found there had been 15mm of rain, and rumbles of thunder here as well as at work.  The grey tabby goes and stands outside in the rain during thunderstorms, and shrieks.  I don't know what goes on inside her head, but I never feel it's very amiable.