respectable finish from a slow start

The frost on the car this morning came as a bit of a shock, after the run of mild weather.  The car thermometer said that it was minus 2.5C, and I fretted slightly that I hadn't set the heaters to run in the greenhouse and conservatory.  I consoled myself with the thought that they should have some reserves of heat to see them through one chilly night, after those sunny days, and anyway, it was too late to do anything about it.

The manager's list of instructions for the weekend asked me to 'do what I could' with the ornamental end-table displays.  Given how little plant material we had in stock that was allowed to be outside rather than safely tucked away in a tunnel, but was not a leafless deciduous pot of brown sticks with no display value whatsoever, doing what I could didn't amount to doing very much.  I started rationalising the tables, so that each one used a limited range of plants and appeared to have some sort of theme, instead of being an indiscriminate jumble of whatever was not under cover.

Coloured stems featured heavily, and I found some willows with nice furry buds, to develop the stem theme further.  Skimmia are allowed to stay out, as are Sarcococca.  I have no idea why these two evergreen species are deemed safe to keep outside over winter, when most evergreens are taken in.  We offer quite a few varieties of both, and the display tables look better when you stick to one or two different sorts per table, rather than a licorice allsorts jumble.  Evergreen Euonymus stay out, and it's worth saving the yellow variegated ones for a yellow themed table, rather than dotting them around through every single display.  The Hamamelis were looking good, and there were some Chaenomeles in flower.  There is a lot of brown in Hamamelis flowers, and I tried to pick that up in the other plants I used with them, and found some Viburnum tinus that had an apple-blossom tinge in its pink flowers to go with the clear pink of the Chaenomeles.

We had the usual quota of regular customers, fortunately only nice ones, and not any of the ones whose appearance in the plant centre makes your heart sink into your wellingtons.  The pleasant couple from Dedham bought a shrub and a couple of bergenias.  A charming petite blonde came in, whose mother-in-law also shops with us, so we have to be careful when ordering plants to make it clear which Mrs C. they're for.  I could even remember without looking at the list which hellebore she is waiting for, but they haven't arrived yet.  There were only two of us on duty, and we only had one till going, which was ample for most of the day, then sudennly in the final hour it got busy with some big trollies going through, and we had a queue, but reached a respectable total for the day's takings in the end.

Back home I put the heaters on.  I've scarcely run them this winter, so I shall indulge myself.  The pots of Geranium maderense in the greenhouse and Streptocarpus in the conservatory looked fine, so no harm was done last night.  The Norfolk Island Pine had blown over.  I forgot to right it this morning, but as it still looks green and alive I left it resting in the embrace of the honeysuckle along the veranda, in the hope it might get some shelter.  It might make it through the next 6-8 weeks alive, and so on to spring, but it might not.  Better not to be optimistic.

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.

don't all rush at once

So that was Day One out of my three day stint at the plant centre.  It was very humid, and rather grey most of the time, though I couldn't grumble about the lack of sunshine given that I'd left my hat at home, and if it had been a bright, scorching day I wouldn't have liked it.  By quarter to eleven we'd only had about two customers, though it got busier later on.  After the last lousy winter, and given the miserable state of the economy, we could so much do with some decent weather, just a few weeks of limpid autumn sunshine to put people in the mood to beautify their gardens.

My job for today, and indeed tomorrow and Monday, was to revamp the display tables.  On Tuesday the owners are hosting a visit by fellow members of the HTA (Horticultural Trades Association) and they want the place to look its best.  This is an industry self-help scheme, in which the owners of local garden centres go and look at each other's premises, and give constructive feedback.  I suppose the idea is to raise standards across the industry, plant sellers of the Essex-Suffolk border unite against Jimmy's Farm, golf, the U3A, and all rival attractions for the spare time and spending power of the local population.  It is rather a sweet idea.  I don't think there was anything like it when I worked in the City.  Instead of tidying up specially for the visit we should really let the HTA group see us in our normal state, then their feedback would be more relevant, but the owners' pride is at stake.  Also, the manager is doing a lecture on bulbs on Wednesday and the tables might as well look nice for that.

There seemed to be something of a shortage of plant material with which to titivate the tables.  I'm sure that in previous years we've had a collection of Hibiscus in full bloom which were useful for displays, and we could do with more flowering grasses.  As I revisited potential sources of plants that I'd previously rejected as too shabby, in some sort of vain hope that they might have improved since the last time I looked at them, I was reminded of an episode from my first (psychology) degree.  I took the child development paper (which illustrated the limitations of purely academic instruction, since I was not personally acquainted with any small children or babies at all, and at the end of it if you'd handed me one I couldn't have told you its age to within 18 months.)  One famous experiment involved showing babies of different ages an object, then putting it behind a door while the infant watched, then secretly removing it.  The children's reaction to this unexplained disappearance was supposed to allow the experimenter to infer whether or not the child had yet developed the concept of objects continuing to exist even when out of the infant's sight.  I objected to the thesis of the experiment, on the grounds that when adults looked for their car keys in the same place they had looked twice already, we put this down to bad temper and didn't infer that the adults held incorrect beliefs about the spatial and temporal habits of car keys, and it seemed harsh to expect a six month old to display a more rational search pattern than a grownup.  (The tutor disagreed.  I don't think academic psychology and I were cut out for each other.)

Eric the rooster turned up OK last Monday evening after his altercation with the peacock. and was cock-a-doodling throughout the day.  My colleagues both asked me if Eric had attacked me yet, but when I said no, why, had he attacked anybody else, it seemed that he hadn't.  Eric was a giveaway rooster, one said darkly, and there was always a reason why roosters were given away.  He had given away roosters himself.  I thought one reason for needing to give away roosters was that you wanted several hens but only one cockerel, and in the normal way of things you'd probably get nearer half and half, hatching a clutch of eggs.  As my other co-worker dislikes Berberis because it is prickly, I assume that on the same basis he distrusts any large bird with spurs.

One of them told me that the true reason for the water tank to have run dry seemed to be nothing to do with the tank not filling, but rather that the owner had emptied it to fill up one of the ponds.  Apparently he did this again in the middle of the week, when the manager was there, and the manager discovered the tell-tale hose leading from the tank to the garden.  So much for blaming the weekend staff for not keeping an eye on the tank.

As this is supposed to be a daily record it is really rather late to talk about last Monday, but I forgot to mention that the gardeners trimmed the yew hedges, and that we bag up the clippings and they are collected for use in making Tamoxifen.  It's easy to assume that drugs nowadays are all sythesised in laboratories, and it's odd to think, as people take their dose of a cancer drug that could save their life, that the active ingredient started off in an Arts and Crafts garden in Suffolk, and one September day gardeners carefully gathered up their hedge trimmings.

the thorn beneath the rose

When I came downstairs this morning I discovered that one of the cats had been sick in the hall, and that the chicken's water was running out.  I cleared up the hall floor and refilled the galvanised drinker, but it was a bit of a scramble getting off to work, what with making my packed lunch, filling up the bird table and collecting the eggs (one egg, very small.  The mad old bat ancient lady chicken has decided that anything more than a pullet sized egg is too much for her nowadays, which is fair enough).

It was an absolutely beautiful morning, still and sunny.  The compost in most pots was still damp from the rain, but I ran the overhead irrigation in the shade tunnel for a few minutes, as the hydrangeas and rhododendrons are so leafy and dry out quickly.  The sun caught the fine spray of water and made the tunnel look like a scene from a tropical forest, and I thought how much more pleasant it was to be standing in a Victorian walled garden looking at a sunlit mist of water and listening to birdsong on a Monday morning than to be sitting in an office looking at a screen and worrying about the latest unfolding of the Greek debt tragedy.

The dog has been fitted with a little tinkly bell on her collar, in the latest battle against her urge to explore and abscond.  As the gardener and I were eating our lunch in the staffroom we heard a tiny metallic sound.  I opened the door and in came the dog, who knows that there is food in the tennis hut, besides being a sociable creature.  I called the boss on the radio to say that we had got the dog, and presently the woman who works in the office came to collect her.  (Staffroom makes it sound rather grand.  We call it the tennis hut because it was used to store tennis gear in the days when there was a tennis court on what is now the car park, but it was originally built as a cart shed.  You can tell this from the wide lintel over the bricked-up former door, before it was fitted with a bijou Edwardian porch.  That and the fact that the brick floor appears to have been laid directly on to the earth).

I was allowed to redo a couple of display tables, and enjoyed a mini-Oudolf moment with Stipa gigantea, Perovskia and Agapanthus, shading off into white hydrangeas and hostas.  I removed some ginger-brown Heuchera that were arguing with some pink flowers I think they were intended to complement, and put them around some terracotta balls with star shaped holes pierced in them, where they looked much more harmonious.  Somebody actually bought one, though as she bought several other Heuchera as well this may have down to prior intention, and not my finely honed merchandising abilities.

After lunch I volunteered to stake and tie in the climbing roses, as I knew that this was on the manager's list of things to do.  He seemed incredulous, and pathetically grateful, that anybody had actually offered to do this job without having to be cajoled into it.  Staking roses isn't so bad.  We use 3 foot canes (garden canes are still not metric.  Don't know why) and any whippy bits of growth that are long enough to be tied to the cane are attached with green tape using a tie-gun.  I don't begin to understand how a tie-gun works, and they are temperamental bits of kit that don't always work anyway.  You squeeze a handle, and two arms come together and jaws on one arm grab the end of the green tape that is fed down the other arm from a spool.  You release the handle and the jaws open, pulling out a length of tape.  You press the tape against whatever you are trying to tie up, in this case one or more rose stems to a cane.  You squeeze the handle again and the jaws close, staple the tape into a loop around the stems, and cut it.  Periodically you run out of tape, or you run out of staples, or the tape jams, or breaks, or piles up in multiple folds in the stapler and fails to cut through.  A customer who was once watching me coaxing a tie-gun into working said that he would have thrown it across the room several minutes previously, and that I must have the patience of a saint.  I don't, though there are times when it would be useful.

I suppose my colleagues don't like tying in the roses because of the tie-gun, and because the roses are prickly, but I only got slightly scratched.  One branch pricked me on the face, a tiny scratch that at home I would have ignored, but it bled for ages and I didn't think I could go on working in the plant centre with smears of blood on my cheek, so had to go and staunch the flow in private with a paper towel until it suddenly stopped.  Another rose caught me in the thumb as I was setting the pot down, quite deep.  That hurt for a minute and I went and found a plaster for it, before I could get compost in the cut.  But as ways of amassing brownie points go, tying in roses isn't too bad, and it probably made up for the fact that I had completely failed to grasp what I was supposed to be doing with the new guide to the gardens, which I should have finished ages ago.

peacocks and flowers

The peacock at work has been displaying his tail.  It is extraordinarily exotic.  Behind the big ornamental Arts Nouveau style feathers he has a shorter fan of stiff feathers, which he rattles.  The hen appears totally unmoved, and goes on eating grass, and I am reminded of the Punch cartoon of a small peahen standing in front of a male with an absolutely huge fan tail, and the caption 'What do you mean, no?'.  The young peacock that hatched last year has been raising his little tail as well, though he doesn't have anything like the full array yet.

The fancy chicken with the ultra large comb, that flops over one eye (I should have thought it would drive her mad) keeps coming into the back of the shop, now that it's getting warmer and we leave the doors open.  Fortunately most of the customers seem to think that this is quaint and charming.  The doors are automatic, but the sensor inside the shop is getting a bit weak, and sometimes it doesn't detect that you are approaching and you have to do a few steps like a square dance to trigger the doors, so leaving them open is easier in some ways.  The sensor outside the shop broke ages ago, and it was quite handy being able to stop customers from wandering in by the back door.  Those in the know are aware that to get in you have to turn a key in the door frame.

We do our own version of the peacock's tail, with arrangements of those plants that are looking especially floriferous or desirable on tables around the plant centre.  They help make the place look nice, and they are shamelessly intended to induce people to spend money on impulse purchases.  Sorry, that's what shops do.  I got to re-do some of the display tables today, which I always enjoy as it gives me a chance to play with all the prettiest plants, and makes a change from picking dead leaves off the Leycesteria.  I try to use things that could be grown together in the garden, partly to give customers some genuinely helpful ideas, and partly because I find the alternative looks so jarringly odd.  The design principles of unity and repetition help, so not too many different varieties on one table, and I aim to find things that look well together in terms of habit, and leaf size and texture, as well as colour.  Today I paired up a variegated Photinia with peachy brown and red young leaves with a Heuchera in just the same shade of russet.  I didn't actually like either plant particularly, but it was a good colour match.  Somebody will buy them.

I got home to find the chickens ranging freely.  Their chaperone, swaddled in layers of fleece and a hat, announced that they were starting to flock together much better.  Then the rooster fell in the pond.  In fairness to him, maybe he didn't know he couldn't walk on the duckweed, but he does now.  He breast-stroked across the width of the pond, shrieking horribly, and I plucked him out, but I think he is traumatised.