The Day of the Locust
We’ve got our garden centres back. Their long overdue re-opening has helped restore a sense of normality, even if that normality is challenged by standing in a straggly queue that snakes round into the staff car park, right on top of where the bin-of-free-pots used to stand.
There is a whiff of old-fashioned hucksterism about queueing to get into a garden centre. None of it, I hasten to add, brought on by commercialism. The carefully managed queue, the 2m spacing guides, the chat with the gatekeeper are all there in the interests of our safety. (And equally in the interests of the garden centre not getting prosecuted by the local authority). It all helps build the sense of anticipation for that moment when you’re free to walk in through the gates and spend, spend, spend. Having waited months to be accorded the privilege, it’s no real hardship to queue outside in the rain, either. In these circumstances a smiling Ukrainian man comes round with an armful of umbrellas to offer to members of the queue. You politely decline. We’re made of tougher stuff in Surbiton and Long Ditton. Monsoon – what monsoon? Nobody thinks of going indoors in Kingston-upon-Thames’s tough southerly borough (and Elmbridge’s troubled northerly borough) until their wellingtons are brimming*
The queue edges forward in fits and starts, governed by the woman glued to her phone failing to use proper queue radar to the person in front who moved off five minutes ago. Finally, finally you get to the entrance and have to answer the gatekeeper’s important question, to which the answer is: “Yes, I can buy using a card, that’s all I’ve been doing for the last two months.”
That question is far too easy. They should have a list of gardening questions. Customers should get three shots at getting a correct answer and if they fail to answer any of the three questions, they should be sent to the back of the queue. That should sort the wheat from the chaff. They should earn their place in the garden centre, not just waltz in waving their VISA debit card.
Once inside the gates, it’s like coming home. Released once more into the land of plants, customers kick up their back legs and bellow like dairy cows seeing fresh green grass in Spring.
There have been some subtle changes to the exterior plant area in the intervening time – the premium plant display aisles have been widened, the stock range is perhaps a touch more limited: do they have enough geraniums and lavender – yes, they probably do. However it’s inside the shop that the major overhaul has happened.
Whereas before, the gift area was full of bacon-addled, five-item-breakfast zombies, now there is an airport-style queuing system where you can line up at a respectful distance with a laden trolley. That is quite easy to navigate, the system shepherds you though. More complex is the directional arrows routing you around the fertiliser and the garden tool racks. That becomes like a game of Pacman the moment anyone stops to look at a product. Stopping to look for ant repellent is a totally understandable action; this is, after all, a shop. However the directional arrows are compelling you in that direction and then the nearest escape route also gets blocked. The clientele of a garden centre are not the kind to brush past at speed a la supermarket, so, like Pacman, you have to work out an exit strategy with a series of 90-degree turns that won’t compromise anyone’s personal space or contradict too many floor arrows. For children who grew up in the 1960s thinking that bears were going to get you the moment you stepped on a crack in the pavement, these are worrying moments.
The mission was to reach the seed displays with the smallest number of collateral “excuse me’s”. The objective was to buy some nasturtium seeds for the mother-in-law and having reached the seed racks with some swift footwork, the sight on arrival was simply amazing. A wave of locusts had passed over the Thompson and Morgan seed stand. The photo above says it all. They had been cleaned out.
There has been a lot of coverage in the media about the surge in interest in gardening, and it was there to see in that single image. The demand to grow things had been so overwhelming that the garden centre simply hadn’t had time to restock. Luckily there were still a variety of nasturtium seeds on sale, probably because nasturtiums haven’t been mentioned on a gardening programme since the 1950s.
People are scrabbling around to find the good things to come out of Covid-19 and along with less pollution and more remote working, has come an interest in growing things and spending time in the garden. That can only bode well for the future health of the country’s gardening industry. Sarah Squire, head of the South-East’s top gardening chain, Squires, says that 80% of their plants are grown in the UK. In a time of wearying news headlines, booming garden centres has got to be something to celebrate.
*which really sounds like it should be sexual slang for some perverse act, but isn’t. Well, not yet anyway. You can still say “cottage gardening” but you can’t say “garden cottaging”.
