in the teeth of the gale

Today I got on with weeding the bed on the way in to the garden, which is what I was doing yesterday.  I've never really got the planting in this corner to work.  When I started off I planted a couple of crab apples, wanting to link the edge of the garden visually to the residual apple orchard beyond.  I still believe it can help anchor a garden in its landscape to copy or echo plants from the broader view inside the garden.  Around them I planted epimediums and Vinca minor and other shade tolerant ground cover plants, having an idea of a little woodland planting.  I had overlooked the fact that until the trees grew the bed was nothing like a woodland, but sunny, windy, and with thin, sandy soil quite unlike the leaf mould enriched earth found in woodland.  Then rabbits ate the bark of one of the trees one cold winter, and I had to start again with a new tree.

The bed is backed by a mixed field hedge, which we had planted when we moved in.  It was a condition of the sale that we would mark our boundary within three months.  The hedge is a useful hiding place for birds, and breaks the force of the wind a little, but sends questing roots out far into the bed, making the problem of the dry, thin soil even worse.  I experimented with Phormium and dahlias, thinking that it would be fun as you drove in through the entrance to be greeted by a blaze of colour, and know that you had arrived, but it was too dry for the dahlias, and the Phormium weren't a great success either.  The group of three 'Jester' functioned as snail hotels, and one of them began to revert from drooping and pink stripey to upright, more vigorous and plain green.  I've seen other pink striped Phormium do this, and am now suspicious of them as a breed, though I've never read about it as a widespread problem.  'Jester' was removed, leaving one upright form which is going to have to come out as well, since the drought, rootiness and two cold winters have destroyed whatever charms it ever possessed.

A portugese laurel, Prunus lusitanicus, that the birds brought, is doing well, as is a bird sown holly.  A fine variegated holly that I planted is handsome, but desperately slow growing.  There is a mystery berberis, which I think is the rootstock of a very early planting of B. dictophylla dating from my commuting days.  A Viburmum tinus finds it too dry.  Olearia nummulifolia grows solidly, but incredibly slowly.  The moroccan broom, Cytisus battandieri, is a triumph.  I've fiddled around with bulbs in the past.  Two cold winters put paid to a couple of pittosporums and a restio, and the meagre soil and root competition from the hedge have pretty much finished off a Cornus kousa.  Lonicera tatarica, a shrubby honeysuckle with red flowers, no refinement but a cast iron constitution, battles along.  A colleague with a very dry garden says it does well for her.  A large Weigela florida 'Variegata' does OK, and a Philadelphus.  Due to poor record keeping I am not entirely sure which one.  One Scotch rose did well, as they are supposed to on sand, while the other died.  A yellow berried shrubby ivy was damaged by snow, but the propped up remains are sort of OK, though it isn't luxuriant, and a chunk of the ivy hedge is half dead.  The supposedly tender Ribes speciosa lives on, though on the small side, and a dwarf lilac close to the hedge does surprisingly well, as do a couple of old fashioned peonies.

In summary, it is a dog's dinner.  A mess.  A memorial to unrealistic ideas, changing plans, and general lack of coherent thought.  It is a peripheral part of the garden, in the sense that one isn't going to go and sit by it, but it is part of the garden that everybody who comes in or out sees.  What it needs is some ground covering, weed smothering, possibly evergreen planting, so that it looks like a well-furnished background to the rest of the garden and I don't spend too much time on it.  My current aim is to remove every dead shrub (I didn't mention Hebe 'Great Orme', another martyr to cold) including the roots (oh goody, more work with the pickaxe) and pick out all the weeds I can find.  Then I will apply a thick coat of mushroom compost and a topping of strulch.  Then I'll wait for the roots of grass I missed to reshoot, and zap them with glyphosate.  Next spring I'll replant.  That's the plan.

Today was extremely windy.  One reason for getting on with the entrance bed, apart from the fact that it needs doing and I hadn't touched it so far this autumn, was that I didn't fancy being under any of the trees, in case bits fell off.  It was a cold wind.  I was wearing a cotton vest.  Then two thermal vests designed to be the base layer of a multi-layered outdoor clothing system, one with a polo neck and the other inherited from the Systems Administrator when it got too small.  Then three cotton t-shirts, one with a collar.  Then the new Millets fleece, with a funnel neck.  Also a fleece neck scarf with drawstring top, and fleece hat.  On my lower half I had cotton trousers over thermal leggings.  Customers who (kindly) ask me at work if I don't get cold have no idea how many layers you can wear, and still move.  But it was very, very windy.  The whizzer stopped turning for a while in the middle of the day.  Presumably it had to be turned off, in case it whizzed too vigorously and broke itself.

I went to the dump first thing, and saw a pied wagtail.  I only ever seem to see them on roads and in car parks.  When I was a child I used to see them on the porch roof.  I am convinced they must eat asphalt.

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.

who has seen the wind

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I

But when half the pots in the plant centre fall down

The wind is passing by.

Or so might Christina Rossetti written, if she'd been working in a plant centre in Suffolk, instead of as a reclusive poet in Victorian Bloomsbury.  It was dreadfully windy, the sort of wind that creates mess and chaos, tipping over the plants (which then spill compost everywhere and crush each other) and driving every coherent thought out of my head.

The owners had a new rooster, who arrived yesterday.  This morning he apparently came into their kitchen while they were having breakfast, and later, when I went up to the house with a phone message I'd taken, he was in the office.  He was an amiable, dumpy bird with feathered feet, who looked to be an agreeable addition to the household.  By mid-afternoon he had disappeared, last seen running into the garden pursued by the peacock, so I hope they find him this evening.  Left out overnight he is likely to be fox food, which would be a shame.

My job for the day was to redo a row of display tables, which is generally an amusing task, though less so while it's blowing three quarters of a gale.  Some nice sedums had come in since the last time I was there, plus Callicarpa bodinieri showing a fine display of their purple berries, pale flowered astrantia that were looking very fresh and bandbox-clean, straight out of a glasshouse, and a selection of cultivars of Pittosporum tenuifolium, so I had some material to work with.  Even so I felt as though I were scrabbling around at times for suitable plants to use, but I think that was partly the stressful effects of the wind.

A longstanding customer rang to speak to a colleague, having heard on the grapevine that she'd not been well, and wanting to offer support and sympathy, which was really very nice of her.  One of the pleasures of working in a small firm where people tend to stay for a long time, is that we get to know some of the regular customers as people, not just as punters that we relieve of money in exchange for goods.

The manager was charging about compiling lists of big orders for the autumn, and I discovered with pleasure that we should be getting some more ginger-scented rosemary, and the extra-tender, extra-blue form of Teucrium, neither of which we've had since spring, and then they were only a few sad specimens held over from last season.  I tried the rosemary, and it died.

wretched wind

Another bank holiday Monday, another day at the plant centre.  I woke up this morning full of ideas of what I was going to do in the garden, then remembered I had to go to work.

The wind is a real nuisance in a plant retail operation.  Pots blow over, plants break their branches or crush their neighbours, and the compost dries out terribly quickly.  It's impossible to use the overhead irrigation systems, except for the trees where the nozzles are low down, as the water blows around everywhere instead of soaking into the pots, so everything except the trees has to be watered by hand.  Sometimes you stand a pot back upright and it has blown over again before you can water it.  We started watering at just after 8.00am, and I was still watering until 10.40am, then started again at 4.50pm and went on until 6.00pm.  My colleague was watering the behind-the-scenes area the other side of the car park, that customers don't go into, until noon.

There is a Paeonia rockii in one of the borders in the plant centre, in full flower.  A customer asked me what it was, and I had to tell her that we didn't have any, and might not be getting them for a long time.  Other customers wanted to know where they could get lunch: we don't have a cafe.  Given the tough time British pubs are facing, it seems very unenterprising of our local hostelries not to put leaflets about their food offering in our shop.  We don't do food, except for biscuits, apple juice and coffee out of a machine, and we're always being asked for recommendations by customers who are making a day out of it.

Somebody wanted an idea for a shrub to flower late on in the year, and seemed happy with my suggestion of  Heptacodium miconioides, the Seven son flower of Zhejiang.  It comes from China, but was only introduced to UK gardens relatively recently, and doesn't even have an entry in my copy of Bean's Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles.  It carries white, scented flowers at the ends of its branches in autumn, and after the petals drop the display is continued (in a good year) as the calyxes turn red, and (in a good year) it produces red berries.  It is one of those plants that I liked as soon as I saw it.  It is a rapid grower: the plants we have in the plant centre have made at least 20cm of extension growth already this season, while confined to their pots.  Another customer was greatly taken with the leaves and open habit of  Lomatia tinctoria.  It is a good-looking plant, and I was able to tell her that based on my own (statistically insignificant) experience of growing one plant, once, it seemed straightforward and easy in cultivation.  I do like it when customers are keen and willing to try unusual plants.

The William and Kate tea towels haven't sold.  I didn't think they would.  I suppose the owner can always use them in a post-modern ironic way to dry things with.