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.

the tea room has landed

It sounded as though the open weekend went off OK.  Saturday's miserable weather hit attendance a bit, but the new tea room was a success with visitors.  It does suddenly look quite good.  When I left work a week ago it had no tables or chairs, none of the catering equipment was plumbed in, and the two new windows were still boarded up.  By the weekend all was finished, and the walls decorated with some reasonably attractive prints.  It was unfortunate that the man who was supposed to come and fit the new coffee machine failed to show up at the appointed time, and staff training ended up being done late on Thursday afternoon, when everybody was exhausted, but the catering student the owner met at a village fund raising supper and recruited to help out turned out to know how the coffee machine worked, which was a stroke of luck.

I think they are looking for staff for the tea room, at least for the summer, as I took a phone call from somebody enquiring about the job.  The owner ran it for today, but I don't think that's going to be a runner in more than the short term.  She went out first thing, and as customers started to arrive we began to realise that we didn't know how much we were supposed to charge for any of the hot drinks or the cakes.  Later on I had to summon her from her lunch to make two cups of coffee.  I cleared a few tables in quiet moments on the till, but slunk into the very edge of the kitchen area, put the crockery down and slid out again.  The owner pointed out where the sink for washing hands was, but I still don't think I should be in the kitchen.  I'm quite sure the dog shouldn't have been there, but of course an open plan tea room and kitchen with the possibility of cake crumbs are going to act like a magnet to the dog.

At lunchtime I went for a walk round the garden, something I don't do very often.  It still wasn't really warm enough to sit outside, but pleasant strolling about.  I found the gardener dividing clumps of snowdrops, and we discussed whether it hurt them doing it at this time of year.  There is a theory among some snowdrop experts that it weakens the plants, as normally they would be making leafy growth and storing up reserves for next year after flowering.  The gardener's view was that it never seemed to do them any harm, and we agreed that if you didn't do it around now you couldn't see where they were, or where the gaps were in existing bulb plantings.

I sat briefly on a bench, admiring the blue sky and white fluffy clouds, and the buzzards gliding high overhead.  There was a very beautiful magnolia in full flower, with great chalice shaped flowers flushed pink.  I went and checked its name on the label, and realised when I got back into the plant centre that I had already forgotten it. It's a sign of age.  Later on I had a very confusing conversation with a customer who was after a peony called 'Beauty of Livermere', since I thought that was a variety of oriental poppy.  I was very relieved when in the end I appealed to the manager for clarification, and he said that there was both a peony and a poppy with that name, and that we only did the latter.

We are showing some sculptures in the garden, I discovered when I walked down there, which explains why we have leaflets about the sculptor displayed in the shop.  They were all of skinny figures with exaggeratedly long limbs, and postures suggesting anguish, not bad as eye-catchers if you wanted a sculpture in your garden, but derivative.  I heard the other day on the radio that Tatty Devine were suing Claire's Accessories for ripping off some of their jewellery designs, and Elizabeth Frink and Giacometti would have a pretty good case against this chap.

my words in print

Blimey.  All those customers who gushingly declare that they would love to have my job, it must be such a wonderful place to work, ought to try it on a day like today.  It rained.  It was windy.  It was cold.  The plants fell over.  There weren't many customers.  Those that did come deserved to get a medal.

The new tea area has grown window frames since I was last there, though the windows themselves aren't ready yet, and the holes in the wall are still neatly boarded over.  The interior walls have received a fresh coat of brilliant white paint, which will disappoint my colleague who was hoping for something warmer.  We were all asked to think of any refreshments that we ought to stock in addition to the tea and cake, and I wrote ginger beer on the list, but refrained from adding 'lashes of'.

The big excitement from my point of view was that the new garden guide arrived from the printers.  The owner was disappointed  with the front cover, which she had expected to be a brighter shade of green.  Apparently her printer told her that it was her own fault for using her web designers to design the booklet, as web designers never understand colour printing.  We all thought that the colour, a dark olive, was good, even if unintentional.  They used my text almost verbatim (I've just checked against the last draft I sent her).  There are a couple of flourishes I suspect the boss of having added, and a couple of mangled substitutions I blame on the web designers, having seen their original wording for the website.  Why alter 'the course of the natural stream' to 'the adjoining watercourse'?  'Adjoining' is a word straight out of estate agents' particulars (along with the phrase 'benefits from') and subtly alters the meaning, to something meaningless.  And I'm slightly worried that plant names I used in their common sense, like rhododendrons, have been capitalised and put into italics to use them in their botanical sense, while retaining the plural s at the end.  Still, overall it is almost exactly what I wrote and I'm quite chuffed to see my words in a printed document that somebody actually paid for.

The annual rainfall at work is even lower than I thought.  I'd put it at 570mm, based on the nearest local site I could find records for on the internet, but the boss has revised that down to 510mm.  Many garden guides don't bother to include any information about the growing conditions, and that always irritates me.  As I go around a garden I like to know what sort of soil it's on and how much rain it gets, to put the planting in context.

A man wearing heavy work boots and a fleece with the logo of another garden on it took away five trees, six tree ties and a pair of gloves, saying they should be invoiced for.  I was pretty sure I recognised the name of his garden, and it would be an odd sort of scam, to have a fleece made specially and then use it to take five trees without payment.  I didn't know him though, and it is a bit odd that our sales staff are supposed to just let people who say they get invoiced walk off with stock.  I asked a while back if we could have a list of customers who were on invoicing terms, but nothing ever materialised.  If eventually we are scammed I suppose at that point we'll slam the stable door.

gone to pot

Today I was mostly potting.  I rather thought I might be, given that I knew there was some potting left over from last week, and went dressed accordingly, wearing two pairs of socks and thermals over my thermals.  The boss didn't allow us to pot over the weekend, as we had to be supervised by the manager.  I don't know if the boss realises that the extent of the manager's supervision is to ask us how those hemerocallis or hostas looked, so that he can write it on his records.  Today's plants were from the Netherlands, and were mostly pretty good, though there was one bag of Tradescantia roots that were five plants short.

There was a potting hiatus in the middle of the day, as we ran out of labels.  The labels are stapled to the sides of the pots for herbaceous plants, and you really do need to staple them to the rim before filling the pot up with compost.  It is possible to retro-fit them, but fiddly and time consuming, and impossible to do without spilling compost.  Plus the finished potting is stood in large blocks so that you couldn't reach most of the pots to label them.  Plus you would be practically bound to lose track of which varieties were in which pot.  The hold-up with the labels occured because they were varieties that we hadn't sold before, so the boss had to write the descriptive blurb for each one before we could print them.  Writing the descriptions is a task that the boss refuses to delegate, and he was supposed to have done it this morning, but it is half term and he took the children out riding instead.  The manager, who had managed to prise both gardeners out of the garden to help, and called in an extra staff member who is normally laid off at this time of year especially to finish the potting, was rather irritated to have his crack potting team standing by with no labels.  We all found other jobs to do in the interim until the boss produced labels, and finally got the last geranium roots safely encased in compost five minutes before closing.

None of us are sure how the tea room is going to work out.  Apparently the idea is that we will have somebody to run it during the busy season.  The gig has gone to the gamekeeper's daughter, who has passed her foor hygiene exams and is also going to make the cakes (at this point I feel as though I might be living in The Archers, in one of the brief interludes when nothing sensational is happening).  In the quiet season the plant centre staff are going to dish out the tea and cakes.  We are?  When I get home from work it generally takes me ten minutes to scrub the dirt from my hands, and my cuffs and the front of my jacket are always covered in a dusting of compost and the odd smear of green slime.  How exactly are we going get this past the environmental health officer?

We do have one splendid new piece of equipment.  Last year a couple of us said that what we needed for the plant centre was a mobile potting bench, so that we had a working surface on which to clean pots that was at the right height to work all day, and not 15cm too low, which the display tables are.  Working for eight hours on a surface that is uncomfortably low would give anybody backache, even the fit youngsters, and the two of us grumbling about it have combined ages of over 110.  I discovered today that the older gardener has indeed made a mobile potting bench, with proper wheels, a sturdy metal frame and elegant wooden handles.  I asked, fascinated, what it was made out of, and it turned out to be based on an old ice-cream cart which had been sitting in one of the sheds for the past fifteen years.  I have no idea whatsoever why the boss possessed an old ice-cream hand-cart, but it goes to show that you should never throw things away.  Eventually they do come in useful.

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.