So I sat back, disciplined myself, and observed. I talked to people. I put forward ideas, and sensed some reluctance, some muted agreement. I tried not to be negative about the status quo. Nobody lets their garden degenerate like this without a reason. It may be shattered morale, or it may be incompetence or lack of vision. There were elements of all three which became apparent. Fortunately, the permanent core of staff did not come under the incompetence category. It was a morale issue, and low morale infected all levels, including the seasonal workers. I had to look for positives in the long term.
In the short term, I had lots of things to familiarise myself with. I had to get to know the volunteers for a start.
The larger garden had only three. One retired bloke who was an absolute joy, who walked across the footbridge over the river from the village on the other side to come to work, helping with the mowing, and two characters with learning disabilities, who were also a real pleasure. One of them liked to come in and turn the compost every week, and the other, although more wayward, was a proper sweetie underneath. He brought me back a cheap plastic clock from his holidays once, which sits on my bookshelves still, keeping perfect time, twelve years later.
The other garden had a dozen or so, one of whom was the ex-nurseryman and fruit grower I have already mentioned, and the rest of whom were ladies involved in the processing of dried flowers, for which we had a purpose-built drying room and workspace at the back of the shop. They were all good people, although, as is typical, most of them had axes to grind. Volunteers generally want the best for the establishments they support, and struggle when they see it failing. The default mechanism is to come up with solutions which suit their personal foibles, so as a manager I often found myself faced with a variety of different approaches requiring appeasement, before implementing the solutions which I deemed necessary after thorough observation.
Not only that, but I also had to learn a little about the retail side of the business, which was run in a dynamic but quite bizarre way by a department manager who would be responsible to me. This proved exhausting. In addition, the shop manager was very glad that I had arrived in one way at least - it would now be possible to dump the administrative chaos upstairs onto my desk, where I was expected to flounder.
For this reason, I was sometimes to be found stuck in my office and away from the gardens, letting them continue in their own way in my absence, while I sorted years of administrative backlog. My office was in a cupboard in the centre of the shop. This was fitted with a small Velux window, had no view and was stifling and headache-inducing. Here I had to get to grips with the weekly accounting, which was performed using the most convoluted computer program ever devised, and took me ten times a long as it would have taken Bob Cratchit in exquisite copperplate longhand. On the door of my office, I placed a sign labelling it, laughably, 'Manager's Office' and appended the following drawing above it -
Fair comment, I should say.
Meanwhile, I fiddled about in the gardens, keeping a watching brief, and undertaking tasks which I could see no one else was going to bother with. As usual, I gave particular attention to the climbers, of which there were a number which were out of control. I was very pleased also to find a couple of fan-trained apricots in the larger garden which needed a lot of work -
The netting, obviously, was there to keep the birds from the blossoms and fruit, but in fact had never been attended to, and the tree itself had grown through it. I had to cut the netting out first before being able to prune and retie the Apricot. When finished, it looked a picture. Typically, that is not really a picture I have. You'll have to make do with this, where the bare tree can be seen against the far wall, minus netting, its shape still largely dictated by the previous umpteen years of not being treated properly -
Also behind the scenes I was able to start gradually tidying up the greenhouse and potting shed, and thinking about what to do with the mower store at the end of the complex of buildings, which so far was all but impenetrable. This would eventually become my tool store, where all hand tools would be neatly racked on the walls, and the mowers stored in the central space. The shelving would be reorganised and used as essential storage for sundry pieces of equipment and consumables -
For now it was just a mess. But it gets better, you'll be pleased to know. as usual I have no photographs to show you of how that particular space was revolutionised by organisation, but I cannot stress how important it is in terms of efficiency and morale to have a tidy workshop, where equipment can be maintained, and most especially, found, when required. And we always put tools away cleaned and oiled every day, once I gained full control of the situation. That meant first ridding the place of some very dirty habits, and allowing some recalcitrant staff to go their own way on the expiry of their contracts.
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