Work-related: everybody looks bad

This post is a little over two years old. I ran into it during the recent blog maintenance, and I was initially surprised that I hadn't posted it, because it looked like it was more or less complete: the pictures were already present, the code for the footnotes (usually the last thing I do with a post, because it's awkward to change once in place) had been done. It's rare for a post to reach this stage without getting posted.

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Zinnia 'Profusion Mix.'
Ouch. The first Saturday of May should not be sunny. It brings out too many customers all at once. It wasn't necessarily terrible to be busy, though I did something to my back early in the day, which hurts, and which would probably heal up just fine if I could rest it, but I've got (as I write this on Sunday morning) two more days of work, and then I have to water all the plants at home, so that's not looking too likely.

(Just FYI, though: the first Saturday in May is probably the weekend you want to show up to shop, if you live around here: our actual last frost date is May 15, give or take, but if you want to be able to buy before we're sold out of things, a couple weeks earlier is about ideal. And actually the first Friday is probably even better, if you can manage it.)

For as many as there were, the customers on Saturday were very well-behaved (better than the co-workers, anyway: one of the co-workers is closer than s/he realizes to being beaten to death with a shovel¹), with one exception:

One lady waved me over to the succulents while I was watering and asked for a price on a $9.95 Adenium obesum.

I told her $9.95.

Tagetes patula 'Little Hero Yellow.'
Oh, she said, well someone told me it was only $5.99.

I don't know what to tell you, I said back. The prices go by pot size, that's a 4-inch pot, therefore it's $9.95.

CUSTOMER: But someone said $5.99.

MR_S: Well, um, we do have $5.99 plants, but That. Is. Not. One. Of. Them.

[long pause]

CUSTOMER: Okay, well, thank you.

Euphorbia 'Diamond Frost.'
So then a couple hours later, one of the front counter people comes back to the greenhouse for something or another, and while s/he's back there, s/he says, so -- what's the price on those plants that have the big bulb thing at the base? Are those succulents or tropicals or what?

MR_S: Which ones? These? [pointing to a Beaucarnea recurvata]

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: Maybe. I'm not sure.

Then it dawned on me why s/he was asking, and I pointed to the Adeniums, and s/he was like, yes, that one. What price are those?

MR_S: $9.95.

Osteospermum 'Summertime Red Velvet.'
FRONT COUNTER PERSON: 'Cause I had a customer insist that somebody had told her $5.99.

MR_S: Yeah, I know which customer you're talking about. I told her $9.95 repeatedly.

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: Wait -- you'd told her $9.95?

MR_S: Repeatedly.

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: [Expletives]²

Bracteantha bracteata 'Firey Orange.'
MR_S: Why? What price did you give her?

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: Well she kept saying someone had told her $5.99, so we wound up giving it to her for $5.99. [pause] You know, I don't mean to talk bad about [customer's ethnic group],

MR_S: [cringes in anticipation]

FRONT COUNTER PERSON: but . . . [proceeds to talk bad about customer's ethnic group]

MR_S: *facepalm*

Only 20 days left.³

Osteospermum 'Summertime Sunshine.'
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¹ Exaggerated for dramatic effect, but s/he has about a 50-50 chance of getting the verbal equivalent of being beaten to death with a shovel, whatever that would be, before I'm done with the job. S/he would be wise to stay out of my way. Tragically, s/he is not a particularly wise person, and probably will not stay out of my way.
² Also exaggerated for dramatic effect. I don't remember exactly what s/he said.
³ Unless I come back for June. Which I said I might do. Not looking real probable at the moment, though.

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For what it's worth, the one problematic co-worker didn't get beaten with a shovel. Still deserves it, though.

I'm not certain which front counter person was in the story -- my personal journal doesn't record the interaction -- but if it's who I remember it as being, then yes, s/he still works there.

Pretty pictures: Pink-Purple to Pink

I've been trying for the last couple weeks or so to sort through the ever-increasing stack of pictures I have, and I have to say, it hasn't actually been going terribly well. It's really time-consuming, and of course I keep taking new pictures as I'm sorting out the old ones, so there's an element of futility to the whole thing.

But, the up side is that I have a bunch of pictures to post now. So here are some. I've decided to go with "pink" as a theme, though the pinkness of some of these is open to debate.

Osteospermum 'Summertime Hot Pink.' Kind of more purple-looking, in this picture. I don't remember exactly if it was really this color.

Clematis 'Nelly Moser?' This is growing in someone's yard in town, so there was no actual ID on it, but I think, after seeing a picture of 'Nelly Moser' at Best in Bloom Today, that's probably what this is. The colors are right, at least, and lynn'sgarden says in the post that it's a popular variety. I wish I'd fiddled with the color a little bit longer; the color here seems a little dull, compared to reality. Oh well.

Catharanthus roseus 'Titan Rose.' One of the things that most pleases me about no longer working at the garden center is that I don't have to deal with the vinca (it's not Vinca, though) anymore. I had bad associations with them anyway, having been forced to plant them once in junior high, at school, for "P.E.," which is a long story and not really the point, but at work, they always had spider mites, and frequently tried to go chlorotic on us, and I just really kind of hate them.

Most everybody still calls this Dicentra spectabilis, but I have it on pretty good authority that the correct name is Lamprocapnos spectabilis. Everybody in town has like six of these, but they're cool plants regardless.

Gaura NOID (possibly G. lindheimeri 'Karalee Pink'). I like these okay, but never see any planted anywhere. I have no idea where they're all going or who they sell to.

Begonia NOID. These are sold as "nonstop begonias," but I don't know if that's an official cultivar name or not. Despite the name, if overwatered, they will stop just fine.

Brugmansia NOID. Every year since 2007, I see these, and my jaw drops and I think I must get a Brugmansia this year, and then every year, fear of spider mites keeps me from actually getting one. We saw this one, and a few others, within the last week, but this one was big and expensive, and the others were doubled varieties (purple/white and yellow). I do not like the doubled Brugmansias and find them unsettling in some difficult-to-explain way. Will this be the year I get one? Maybe. The pink ones are really beautiful.

If Time Ran Backwards for Plants

It doesn't happen all that often, but sometimes at work I luck into doing some really long, boring thing, and my brain has to entertain itself. Usually, this doesn't result in anything very interesting (in fact, usually, it means I have a song running through my head for hours at a time -- or sometimes just a couple lines from a song, if I don't know the whole thing, which is horrible), but every once in a while, something bubbles up that's odd enough to share.

So last Monday, I was transplanting plugs of Impatiens (or "fucking Impatiens," as it's more commonly known among the staff¹) and the plant-related synapses in my brain (which are many) happened to be firing at the same time as the ones that were remembering a snippet from Slaughterhouse Five, and I started to think, what would it be like if time ran backwards for plants but not people?

Fucking Impatiens 'Super Elfin Lipstick.'
Now obviously time runs the direction it runs, and so any thought experiment like this winds up running into inconsistencies eventually, but I choose to ignore that. Here's what I came up with:

• Plants are these things that people erect with axes, or random pieces of debris on the ground that assemble themselves, stand upright, and then turn green. This is especially likely to happen after a freeze. Once erected, they slowly leak carbon dioxide and pollution and consume oxygen, in an attempt to suffocate all human life. (We think.) So people are always trying to get rid of plants, by setting aside special areas of property, called gardens and lawns, to shrink them (plants are highly attracted to something in the center of the earth) until they're small enough to fit in pots. They then bring the pots to garden centers, where we pay them to take their dangerous plants, which we deflate further in the greenhouse. When they're very, very small, we shove them into flats of very tiny plugs, seal them into boxes, and send them away, so they can't hurt us any more. Sometimes we stick the tiny plants into trays and they shrink down to little rocklike structures called seeds, which don't emit carbon dioxide and are relatively safe, but we still seal these seeds up in packages to prevent them getting out.

Osteospermum 'Bronze Charmer,' the color-changing variety I mentioned a few days ago. I think the new flower is on the left and the old flower is on the right, but I'm not positive about that. In any case, these flowers are both from the same plant, whatever the sequence of events actually is.

• This is never a permanent solution, though, because plants are always spontaneously forming themselves from rotting gunk on the ground. Occasionally, too, and especially when there's a dirty plate in front of a person, the person will vomit up pieces of plant, and then reassemble them in his/r mouth, before putting them on the plate. This is called eating. Bugs vomit up enormous quantities of plants all the time. So we never get rid of all of them at once.
• Fertilizer is the chemical residue left behind by deflating plants. Sometimes people are organic gardeners, and the deflating plants leave behind manure as a residue instead. Manure is apparently much more dangerous, because people never leave it just lying around: they always pack it into bags and send it away for other people to place in pastures and barns, so the manure can moisten itself and eventually jump up cows' asses.

Ipomoea batatas 'Blackie.'

• Weeding is the process of sticking certain quick-deflating plants into the soil.
• In some special circumstances, the debris on the ground will leap onto the plant and quickly become brightly-colored, which we call flowers. Flowers will remain on the plant until visited by a pollinator like a bird or bee, which rub pollen onto and vomit nectar into the flower, at which point the flower will close up and begin to shrink into the plant.
• Plants are also always beaming heat and light up to the sun (and to a lesser extent, lamps and candles and stuff). They have uncanny aim. This is called photosynthesis and is something of a mystery, though we think it has something to do with all the carbon dioxide they're pumping out.
• Sometimes garbagemen will leave bags of leaves at the curb for homeowners. The homeowners then scatter the leaves all over their lawn with a rake (raking), and a while later the leaves jump onto nearby trees and change colors, eventually turning green and shrinking. Exactly where the garbagemen are getting all these leaves in the first place is unclear, but the supply appears to be inexhaustible.
  
• Watering is the process of deflating plants by sucking water out of them with a hose, or watering can.

Calibrachoa 'Superbells Saffron.'

• Once in a while, enormous clouds of smoke and flame will converge upon a charred spot and form plants. These are called wildfires, and although they create new plants, which is unfortunate, fires can be quite beneficial. Among other things, they can heal burn victims, build new houses out of rubble, and bring animals back from the dead. Wildfires appear to be particularly creative if firefighters can "water" them.
• For unknown reasons, people in parts of Central and South America, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and much of Africa are putting a lot of effort into destroying their natural plant-free areas and erecting enormous forests instead. This probably means that they are trying to destroy the planet, or hate the United States, or something like that. Whatever it is, it must be important, because they're actually taking their houses apart and stitching trees together to be planted in these areas.

If you think of anything I've left off the list, say something in comments.

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¹ It's not that it's so terrible. There's just so much of it.

Pretty picture: Osteospermum 'Bronze Charmer'

Yesterday at work, Younger Co-Worker attempted to guess my two favorite annuals based on what we had more varieties of this year compared to last year. She guessed coleus (Solenostemon scutellarioides) and Osteospermum cvv. She got it half right: coleus is high on the list.

This year in coleus we will have: 'Quarterback,' 'Fishnet Stockings,' 'Merlot,' 'Merlin's Magic,' 'Pink Chaos,' 'Gays Delight,' 'Saturn,' 'Kingswood Torch,' 'Dappled Apple,' 'Tilt a Whirl,' 'Electric Lime,' and 'Splish Splash.' The last four of those are new compared to last year, though 'Tilt a Whirl,' at least, had been around previously. 'Dappled Apple' was a substitution: we were supposed to have gotten more 'Gays Delight' -- which, contrary to the name, ain't all that -- but I guess they were out or something and sent us 'Dappled Apple' instead. Which 'Dappled Apple' is more similar to 'Electric Lime' than 'Gays Delight,' so I'm not sure that was the best of all possible substitutions, but whatever.

Everybody has their favorites: WCW likes 'Tilt a Whirl,' Perennial Expert has had nice things to say about 'Gays Delight,' Younger Co-Worker is terrifyingly insistent that 'Merlin's Magic' is the best one, and I . . . well, it's probably 'Kingswood Torch,' though if 'Splish Splash' ages well, I could see it winning out in the end.

So far the customers seem to be siding with WCW, and 'Tilt a Whirl' is selling the best, but it's also early.

Younger Co-Worker got wrong, though, the guess about Osteospermum. I like them, but Portulaca are better. I mean, if I were forced to choose. Which I'm not.

Osteospermum 'Bronze Charmer.' Picture is really much better opened in a new window.
We do have a couple new ones this year, though unlike with the coleus, I can't name them all off the top of my head. The picture is of 'Bronze Charmer,' which changes colors as it ages, and is variously lavender, peach, yellowish, pink, and orange. It seems very nice. We got more varieties of Osteospermum this year less because I like them a lot (though I do) than because we sold out of them pretty early last year.

Portulaca, we're just getting the same stuff as last year, no more no less. Although I really like them, I don't fool myself into thinking that everybody else in the world shares my enthusiasm. I save those kinds of delusions for Anthurium andraeanum.

UNRELATED LIZARD UPDATE: Visited a pet store yesterday to find food. No mealworms. (?)(!) Freeze-dried flies of some kind instead. Also I balked at spending $24 for a heating pad. (Baby steps!)

We have a ten-gallon aquarium for Nina (somehow the husband had obtained one before Nina entered our lives -- I'm not sure how that happened, but obviously it was kind of prescient), though for the moment she's still in her glass cookie jar. The aquarium will be planted at some point today?, I guess?, and then Nina will be packing her stuff and moving. Hopefully anoles are pretty tough: she's had to go through a lot lately. I take some comfort in the fact that she's been a very good honey-eater, when I've remembered to give it to her. (I'm kind of a bad lizard dad. Baby steps!)

I'm thinking this might be the time to buy that Fittonia I've occasionally thought about getting. It's handy that I was already thinking about plant toxicity, at least: I have some sense of what I can and cannot put in the aquarium with her. Should I try to overwater? I'm sure fungus gnats are yummy. . . .