Although my blogs are always suffused with the deep glow of my love for my fellow men as we tread together through this great adventure we call life, a punter came in during the summer and said that my blogs were a wondrous  paean to grumpiness or words to that effect. His only complaint was that I didn’t write them frequently enough. Obviously if I did so, he wouldn’t have got the plants he came in for, but now the pressure has eased off slightly and just to make him and his mates happy, here are my thoughts as we lurch into recession-hit winter. (To interpose a not-entirely-red herring, -just a pinkish mackerel perhaps, I would say that  this government’s self-promoted “initiatives” to save the world are quite sufficient to dispel any feelings of “Mellow fruitfulness”  without any contrived grumpiness on my part. In fact the government spinners are about the only people who don’t trot out this sad old cliché every Autumn, presumably because they breathe in nothing that doesn’t come  through an air conditioning system and would gratifyingly expire if placed in a rural environment).

OK, so here’s a grumpy bit. I know that our old catalogue used to say that most of the herb books published in the UK had photographs of plants taken here. Whether there will be any more though  is open to doubt, we supplied plants to  two publishers’ photographers within the same week a couple of months ago. Like all photographers, they wanted the plants yesterday and begged us to relax our normal rule that plants should be paid for prior to despatch . Instead,  they  both promised payment  within ten days. Two months on, we are still waiting.   They also guaranteed “free publicity” at the back of their books. This is normally of no value whatsoever, only one recent book has made any impact on our sales. Unfortunately whilst this described ethnobotanic remedies, it didn’t give many clues about the plants themselves, so this morning’s request for annuals is just one in a line of  time-wasting exercises in that the enquirer has to be told in a polite and friendly way that no matter how carefully the plants are packed and how rapidly they are sent out, they will inevitably be dead within a month. We can always recognise the book from which  these enquiries originated, the punters always ask for the same six herbs.

I have had three customers questioning the identity of plants in the last twenty four hours. To me, this is entirely reasonable. Unlike others in this trade, I don’t claim either omniscience myself nor a direct line to God’s taxonomic department. (Come to think of it, it wouldn’t do much good if I did, according to Genesis  2 : 19 -20, he got Adam to name everything for him and he made such a mess of it, the likes of Linnaeus and the RHS have been trying to sort out the chaos  ever since) Anyway, in the first case, the customer didn’t recognise the plant which she had asked for,  the second one asked the species of a Zingiber, which I had avoided giving as I didn’t know myself and it’s a confused family. I had sold the plant to him as  a Galanga sp, it would have been hubris to have attempted to be more specific than that. Less intelligently, the third wanted to know if  a plant on our list was what I claimed it to be. Oh dear, I would scarcely have called it “Tom” if its real name was “Dick” or “Harry”.  If he wants a DNA analysis, he can pay for it himself, all I can do is to send out the plants in good faith.  Actually a couple of years ago I realised that some of the plants obtained from third parties over the last forty years, had come to us mislabelled and since then, we have had an on-going taxonomic review. The RHS helps several times a year and the Labiate chap at Kew has very kindly offered his services as well. Like I say, claiming to be infallible is mere foolishness.  Watch out for anybody who claims to be a “herb expert” is what I say. I confess that when people ask if I am such a beast, I always deny it. Frequently they will mistake a refusal to blow my own trumpet for ignorance (not so much out of  modesty but an acknowledgement of the potential for embarrassment if I am wrong and subsequently caught out)  and tetchily reply that they will go and ask x instead,. When they gleefully tell me later that “x said blah blah blah”, I am never quite sure whether they are  benevolently trying to alleviate the  cloud of woeful ignorance that envelopes me or whether they are malevolently trying to make me feel stupid.  Either way, I usually fall about laughing at the inanity of the answers they get and in which believe so implicitly. Personally I think that exploiting the gullibility of the public is rather a distasteful way of  giving oneself an ego-trip

Several times this year, customers have complained about other nurseries which have allegedly supplied them with misidentified plants, this I regard as wholly reprehensible behaviour. Complain to the nursery which made the purported cock-up, but don’t tell me, implying that  the original people were a load of crooks deliberately trying to defraud  innocent members of the public. One of the nurseries complained of,  I know very well and can confirm that it maintains the highest ethical standards, though the person running it is young and hasn’t got the wealth of experience built up by us geriatrics. The reasons for misidentifications are countless, a minor lapse of concentration being the most obvious one. We try and stick similar species into different shaped or coloured pots, black for French taragon and terracotta for Russian for instance, but when you have more similar plants than permutations of pots, as in the case of Alliums, this system falls down. Accurate labelling is required, but we found in the market that myopic old bats would pull a label out of the pot, squint at it and then stick it back in a different pot altogether, the curious thing was that having pulled out the labels they never bought the plants,  it used to drive me mad, “Grumpy” is an understatement! Another cause for complaint is that the popular names are variously applied to different plants, again it is usually Alliums that cause most problems and in fact it was Allium cepa var perutile, usually “ever-ready onion” that gave rise to the nursery being complained of above. It shares a number of names with A. cepa var proliferum,   so when someone rings us up and asks whether we have any Tree onions/Welsh onions/Siberian onions/Egyptian onions etc we try and persuade them to have one of each to ensure they get at least one of the plants they were thinking of, or better still come and have a look. In fact, my original “Tree onion” came from Tumblers Bottom in its previous incarnation about forty years ago. I had been selling the progeny for some time whilst wondering why the plants never developed baby onions at the top before it dawned on me that I had been flogged a Welsh onion (Allium fistulosum). All of which demonstrates that errors once made, are self-propagating and that nurserymen have an enormous responsibility to make sure the plants they send out are correctly identified.

Plants raised from seed cause endless difficulties, each of the five seed companies we deal with on a regular basis has sent the wrong or mislabeled seeds in the past and the owners have been mortified when this has been pointed out to them. However one of them doesn’t give a damn and the results are unpredictable to say the least.  A colleague described their seeds as being either “fossilised or mis-named” but these days we have learnt to enjoy surprises rather than to pass on the resulting plants before they have been stringently checked,. That said,  when a seed-house to  whom we wholesale seed, told me last year that one of their customers complained that the Periploca graeca traced back to me was in fact a strangle vine, I blamed  what I thought was our original uncaring source above., The big laugh was that months later I found  an ancient unopened packet of  “Periploca” seed from the  same seed house that had made the complaint and was of course the true original source of our seed. Now  they will have to amuse themselves by rummaging back through their archives and find a supplier other than myself to blame. They will have a long way to go, all our seed purchases since 2000 have been computerised and so the dodgy stock must have arrived in the 1990s and we have been selling the off-spring in good faith for years  during which time no one has made any complaint whatsoever. The moral is never to rely on your customers to put you right (they will probably go off muttering to another nursery, like the Allium purchaser above) nor to trust any seed to be what it says on the packet, the latest incident was a packet of “Bronze fennel” provided as a sales promo from an up-market gardening magazine which came up 100% green. You would have thought they would have checked first, wouldn’t you? But this was a magazine that used to have at least one undeliberate mistake per issue, so one shouldn’t be too surprised even if they have latterly got more accurate At the same time and perhaps not coincidentally they have also become more boring/populist and I have cancelled my subscription. Incidentally the seed was supplied to them by the one firm that  could come up with both correctly identified Heartsease seed and which actually germinated last year, so they aren’t all bad. . Most other packeted Viola tricolor was either dead or rubbishy field pansy, apparently derived from a single dodgy source that had cornered the market and  with whom I crossed swords many years ago.  

This isn’t what I intended to write about at all, Since I last blogged anything, we have had various RHS shows and the splendid International Lavender Conference at Cambridge, but they will have to wait. Meanwhile yet another internet Russian wants to marry me and have my children, she seemed unfazed by the photograph I sent her of me looking like a Victorian “Pater familias” posing with all six grandchildren, if she thinks after all that lot, I still possess either the motivation  or the  physical breeding capacity, she must really believe that I am superman.  How can I be grumpy in the face of such adulation?

I don’t know where you read these bloggy things,- in the bath perhaps in which case your water will be getting cold so I will leave you to it and go and cook some supper. .