introducing the Caucasian wing nut

As I was standing in the hall this morning, piling on more layers of clothing in preparation to leave the cosy kitchen and go to work, a muntjac walked right past the front door, travelling from the direction of the wood towards the lettuce farm.  That's not such a welcome wildlife sighting to start the day.

It was very quiet at the plant centre.  The temperature never rose above 3 or 4 degrees C, and it's forecast to get colder, so I can't blame people for not feeling an immediate desire to come and buy plants.  Even the inside of the shop felt cold.

We received a visit from a woman who is staying with the owner's parents, who had been given the impression by somebody that we had Pterocarya fraxinifolia in stock.  I'm not quite sure how that came about, as I don't think any member of staff told her that.  After we'd failed to find any about the plant centre we asked the boss, who checked on the computer and confirmed that we probably hadn't any, so told the gardener to take a mattock and dig a nice straight sucker up for her from the tree in the arboretum.  P. fraxinifolia is a lovely, large tree, with big divided leaves ('fraxinifolia' = leaves like an ash, Fraxinus.  The clue's in the name), and huge, dangling greenish white catkins in summer.  I have admired the boss's tree in full bloom, but never grasped that it was such a prolific suckerer.  My colleague took the customer to see the sucker being dug up, and because she wanted to see the tree for herself, and reported that the suckers were coming up over an area of tens of square metres.  The Hillier manual says that it is happiest in a moist loamy soil, and is particularly suitable for planting near lakes or rivers.  It sounds like the boss's specimen is extremely happy.  His father-in-law's friend began to look rather alarmed, and to talk about keeping her Pterocarya in a pot.

I tried to finish the pots stock take, but some didn't have labels, or even prices, and the names on the stock list were as arbitrary and ridiculous as Ikea furniture designs, so there was no logical way of matching physical pot to stock item on the print-out, if you weren't already in the know.  It began to drizzle.  My cold, which had been seeming to go away, resurged last night as a spectacularly phlegmmy cough, and I didn't think that standing about outside in the cold and rain was doing it any good at all.

None of the staff know what is happening about the tea room.  After a flurry of builders arriving to quote nothing else happened, and I presumed that in view of the Eurozone crisis and general economic doom the management had decided to conserve their cash and postpone it, but today the owner went on a food hygiene course.  Maybe she is just planning ahead.  We are surely getting too close to the busy spring period to have the builders in now.  Any kind of change at work always seems to take a very long time.  When I first worked there, the tills were outside in a small garden shed.  The owner and the boss spent a year agonising over whether it was a good idea to move them inside, and even after they had bought new counters to put the tills on, the tills stayed in the shed for several more months while the new furniture stood unused in a corner at the back of the shop.  Also when I started working there we didn't have uniforms, and after the idea was mooted that we should wear something that made in obvious who were members of staff, reps from assorted work wear companies were summoned in to a whole series of meetings stretching out over months, bringing samples of our logo stitched on to various fabrics, before it was finally agreed that we would have a uniform, what it would be, and who would supply it.  Same with website designers.  So I expect they'll get there eventually with the tea room, but they might need another year or two first to get used to the idea.

problems of access and choice

It was a grey morning, the cloud hanging low, and driving to work I passed a hawk sitting on a gate post.  I presumed it was a kestrel that had given up hovering because it couldn't see anything.  It had a dark back with barred markings.  A colleague suggested it might have been a female sparrow hawk, which have bright yellow legs.  I didn't see this one's legs, trundling past it at 30mph, but I'll try and remember that for next time.  She recently saw some short eared owls on some rough grass by the river Stour, when she was out beating, but I definitely wouldn't recognise one of those.

An early phone call at work was from a woman who wanted a white flowered camellia.  I described what we had in stock to her (not much, some tiny specimens of 'Silver Anniversay' and a couple of 'Alba Simplex' and 'Mathotiana Alba'.  She then warned me that she was a wheelchair user, and asked if we still had the gravel in the plant centre, which is not wheelchair friendly.  I had to confess that we did still have it, not least because we couldn't afford to replace it with paving over such a large area.  We arranged that when she arrived she would ring us, and we would take the plants out to her car for her to have a look at them.  I pointed out that it might be a good idea to bring enough cash, or we were happy to take a cheque, since if she wanted to use the credit card machine she would need to get into the shop.

She offered to tell me her pin number.  I promised that if she wanted to do that I would never tell her bank that she had, and she said it was all right, she had to do it quite often, at petrol stations.  That is something I never even thought of.  I read Melanie Reid's 'Spinal Column' in the Times supplement when one of my colleagues brings it into work, and I had imagined the difficulty of getting into shops, especially small independents, but it never occurred to me that you wouldn't be able to do something as mundane as pay for petrol.  I suppose the alternative is to carry a lot of cash, but that isn't ideal either.  You would feel exposed even withdrawing it, then continuing on your way in your chair.  When she arrived she liked one of the plants, and had brought enough money to pay for it in the car park.  She had a beautiful and calm smile, despite the fact that each day of her life must contain enough aggravation and petty annoyances to keep the rest of us going for a fortnight.

The next customers ended up bewildered by choice.  They had been to Anglesey Abbey, and fallen for the charms of the grove of white stemmed birches, which they had photographed.  Unfortunately the name they had latched on to was Jacquemontii.  When they discovered that there were several different named varieties of Betula utilis var. jacquemontii they became frozen with indecision.  We didn't have the straight species in stock anyway.  We had 'Grayswood Ghost', which has extra long catkins as well as the striking white bark, but having not seen catkins at Anglesey Abbey they didn't want them.  I don't know why not, given that they weren't being offered a choice between bark and catkins but the opportunity to have both, but they had a set idea of what their birch trees should look like, and catkins were not included.  They were very reluctant to believe that the brown stems of our young trees would turn to the glistening white they had admired, even after I had pointed out the white patches developing at the base of the trunk where it was thickest.  It was a pity not to have sold them some 'Grayswood Ghost' on the spot, but I expect they'll be back, when they've done some more reading up and adjusted to the idea that there are so many different sorts of white stemmed birch.

Then we went on with the stock take in the shop.  This is a job of such awful, mind-numbing tedium that if you let yourself think about how boring it really is you would lie down on the ground and refuse to open your eyes, or start howling like a distressed inmate of the Battersea Dogs' Home.  The whole thing ought to be done using bar codes, on an electronic tablet, instead of by hunting manually through about 80 pages of printout of an excel spreadsheet for something that fits the description and price of each stock item.  The spreadsheets are in no discernable order, and the things in the shop are artistically dotted around all over the place.  Still, I've only got one day of that left to go, and then by Monday week they must have finished.

It got very cold later on.  My colleagues at 4.00pm asked if anybody should stay late.  I said firmly that I didn't think so.  Nobody was going to come now.  When I got into my car the thermometer read one degree.

taking stock

The owner and I walked around the garden first thing, with the latest draft of the garden guide, checking that everything mentioned occurred at the point where the text said it would (it did) and adding in extra trees worthy of mention.  There was lots to see, with big fat bunches of snowdrops almost fully open, and camellias and witch hazels in bloom.  As Monday mornings go, being paid to walk around an interesting garden is well up there as a good way to start the week.  The dog came along, and more or less stayed with the owner for the entire tour.  Apparently on Saturday she was taken on a shoot and disgraced herself, charging around uncontrollably.  Today, truffling about in evergreens against the wall of the plant centre, she flushed out a large muntjac, which ran away in a lumbering and slightly non-urgent fashion.  After a long pause the dog followed, without conviction.  She is a terrier, not a hound, and doesn't seem to consider that chasing large beasts of the field is part of her remit.  It's just as well, really, as she gets lost often enough running after rabbits.

Things went downhill after the positive start, and I was required to scribe for the shop stocktake.  Stocktaking the shop is a task of such awful, tedious grimness that I think it is worse than doing my tax return, if that is possible.  The stuff in the shop comes from umpteen different suppliers, and we don't have bar-codes.  Records of stock brought forward and ordered during the year are entered on an excel spreadsheet so large that the printed version is stapled together in four separate sections, because it is too fat for our staplers to cope as a single document.  The person doing the counting announces what the stock item is, and the scribe has to hunt for it in the vast spreadsheet.  Sometimes whole minutes elapse between the counter saying how many items, and the wretched scribe finding the right page, by which time both have forgotten the answer and the counter has to count them again.

Insecticides.  Fertilisers.  Fungicides.  Garden lanterns.  Lamp oil.  String.  Gloves.  Mugs.  Watering cans.  Raffia.  Hose connectors.  Toiletries.  Vases.  Trugs.  Metal obelisks.  Garden hand tools.  Jam pot covers.  Vegetable peeling bins.  Bird boxes.  Bird feeders.  Plant supports.  Bird food.  Plant supports.  Books.  Greetings cards.  Tea towels.  Soil testing kits.  Plant labels.  Wooden fruit.  Notepads.  Bridge sets.  Candles.  Tea cosies.  Shopping bags.  Swiss army knives.  Seeds.  Door stops.  Boot jacks.  Garden kneelers.  Beneficial miccorrhizae.  Coat hooks.  Plastic tubs.  Toasting forks.  Nutcrackers.  Scrubbing brushes.  Tissue box holders.  Place mats.  Seed storage tins.  Kitchen roll holders.  Gift wrap.  Paper napkins.

We sell all of these and more, mostly in multiple sizes and colours and varieties.  You wouldn't believe how many different sorts of gardening glove we stock, or how many varieties of string.  Sometimes the boss has loaded the stock code on to the spreadsheet, but sometimes there is just a description.  Sometimes the boss's description doesn't pick up on the key word that appears on the packaging, so a 'power saw' is recorded as a 'folding saw' (probably a more accurate description, looking at it).  The scribe then spends a long time trying to match what the counter has told them to the spreadsheet, without success.  Sometimes similar items appear in more than one place on the spreadsheet, so gloves give way to wellington boots, but then over the page there are suddenly some more gloves, as the spreadsheet fails to run in stock code order.

It would be too simple if all of the watering cans were together, or all of the string in one place.  To make the shop appear more tempting there are themed tables and ornamental displays.  One of my colleagues put together a display of green things.  It was quite cute, in a sort of Gardens Illustrated shopping section way, and mixed up string, raffia, candles, vases, watering cans, candles, kitchen waste caddies, bottles for making infusions of herbal oil, gloves and a textile door stop, all coloured different shades of green.  In all it ran across at least a dozen different categories of the stock sheet.  My colleague would tell me that the next thing was a glove code TML406S.  I would spend five minutes trying to find my way back to gloves.  She would say 'There's one of those', and on we went, hunting this time for the green metal vertical sided vase.

The new member of staff starts tomorrow.  Poor sod, he is going to have a baptism of fire.  After the stocktake things can only get better for him.

end of stock take (and not before time)

The stock take, and my role in it, are finally over for another year.  Today I finished the count in the heated polytunnel.  At least that meant I spent the morning with some plants, which was an improvement on yesterday afternoon, which was spent counting bird boxes and packets of jubilee clips.  The plants are pretty tightly crammed in at this time of the year, so reaching them all to read what they are is a bit like playing a solo game of twister, especially as most of the labels are below knee height.  Who would have thought there were so many different sorts of Indigofera?  They all look like heaps of dead sticks without their leaves, and I wouldn't want to mix up my pendula and my potaninii, or my hebepetala and my heterantha.  It's lucky that many years' experience of commuting and working in an office prior to my horticultural career left me with a highly developed ability to read upside down.  One must extract enjoyment where one can, but thank goodness that's over.

taking stock

The financial year end is approaching at work, which means that the stock taking season has started.  We've finished roses, conifers and climbers so far, which means that now each time we sell any of those we have to write it down.  As the number of completed categories grows so does the amount that has to be recorded at the till, like a demented iterative party game, while the poor customers stand by.  Today I acted as scribe while the manager called out numbers for shrubs and herbaceous plants in the back-up behind-the-scenes polytunnel (it is officially called the herbaceous tunnel but is on the far side of the car park so generally referred to as the other side.  I always find it slightly disconcerting when colleagues say 'I'm just going over to the other side' meaning they are going to the herbaceous tunnel).  Scribing entails sitting in a green plastic chair with a clipboard on your lap and a pile of computer printouts, writing down the numbers the person counting calls out to you against the relevant lines of the stock list, and occassionally asking for elaboration e.g. 9cm or 2L pot, which supplier?  A working knowledge of botanical Latin speeds things up.  If you don't know that Kalopanax begins with K, but Caryopteris and Calycanthus start with C though the initial sound is also K, while Ceratostigma begins with C despite sounding like S, and the P in Ptelea is silent, then you are both going to be there for an extremely long time.  The drumming of heavy rain on the tunnel roof introduced an element of confusion.  I was intrigued by the sound of Buddleia verbosa but it turned out to be B. globosa.  The other main thing about stock taking in a polytunnel in January is that you get unbelievably, obscenely cold doing it.