Day 106 - Surviving private service

I should have known better. I was accustomed to applying for jobs in big organisations in response to adverts in the professional horticultural press which took up at least half a page and cost over £1000. This was a single-column five-line ad in the local paper. It was obviously a big garden in an old country house and more the sort of thing I was used to, but it was also working for a private employer, which I had always vowed to avoid.

The interview took place at first in my own house, which was in itself weird. This was then followed up by two visits to the property, on the other side of the country. These took the whole day, and involved trekking round the garden with the owner, listening to tales of how marvellous the place was and what a fantastic garden he had, full of rare plants. Well, it wasn't. Actually it was - full of rare plants, I mean, but they were mostly Rhododendrons, which as you know, I can't stand. What it wasn't was a fantastic garden.

I managed to turn those two negatives into a positive in my desperation, and decided it was about time I learned about Rhododendrons and whatever it was that made people obsess over them. It went without saying that for one who had made his reputation restoring derelict gardens, the fact that this one was in need of a lot of help wasn't daunting in the least, but more of an encouragement to take up the challenge.

What I hadn't been able to predict was how different it would be, working with a private employer with a divine right to overrule every sensible piece of advice offered. On my first tour of the garden, prior to taking up the offer, it was revealed to me that when creosote had been banned, the boss had bought up several oil-drums of the stuff as a protection against it running out. And this was a person who held high office as an amateur figurehead in the world of horticulture. A respected figure in a world where environmental considerations were paramount. I also found out that one of the jobs the two gardeners (that's me and my assistant) would have to do was to chop logs for heating the house in the winter. What I didn't discover till later was that this would be done in an open-ended shed with an unguarded circular saw run from the tractor PTO by an unguarded belt 15 metres long. It turned out that a pathological hatred of Health and Safety was nurtured here, as if, rather than protecting the valuable staff asset, it was designed to make everything more difficult and more expensive. Because, let's face it, you don't get to be a multi-millionaire by wasting your money on safe equipment for other people to use. But to be fair, he applied the same rules to himself as to us. He would rampage through the gardens at weekends carving down trees with a chainsaw for which he had had absolutely no training and didn't even know how to sharpen himself, that task being one performed surreptitiously by my colleague during the week. One day, the boss came to me, reporting that he had nearly been decapitated by a falling pane of glass  in the greenhouse, and could I fix it up so it didn't kill him next time. No suggestion of getting some structural work done by professionals to stop the roof and walls twisting every time you opened the door. This was the building in which we workers spent most of our time hiding from the rain and taking our breaks. Decapitation - a normal hazard of the job. It turned out that he didn't provide staff toilets either. I asked my colleague in my first week where they were, and he just said, 'take some toilet paper out in the trees'. I got caught short one day and was quite self-conscious sitting under a bush in the drizzle with a bare bum right next to the main drive. It probably wouldn't have bothered my workmate though, who was an intrepid Munro bagger, probably accustomed to performing his evacuations hanging from a rope in the snow.

Anyway, I started the job, choosing to commute across the country each day rather than take up residence there, because the place was so depressing. Imagine being surrounded by 70 acres of Rhododendrons on a lowland hill swamp with five and a half feet of rain a year, and views out onto despoiled sitka-planted forestry land, with only the shepherd next door for company.

Well after a while, I had to relent, and moved in to the available cottage, which was cold, dark and unfurnished. I realised this would give me access to a toilet, so I felt I had little choice. I would stay there when I was working, and go home on my days off, which were during the week, as I had to be available at the weekends to take instructions from the boss who was away in the city from Monday to Friday. My partner would come to stay with me on Saturday and Sunday, which she hated with a vengeance, as the place was so dismal, and I was out at work all day. As an inducement to move in and be available on demand, I was offered the pick of a whole barn-load of second-hand furniture to fill the house with, which sounded generous until I looked at it, and rejected every item on the grounds that I would have taken it to the tip long since, had it been mine. Every item was either broken, stained or had been in a fire at some time in its life. We had a big trip to Ikea to furnish the place on the cheap. Our conservatory chairs even now are the ones I bought for that place, and they are the best support for my back that I have found, so some good came of it.

I'm going to put up one picture today, before going into the problems with the job in tomorrow's post. It is a picture of one of the plants I brought with me to try to improve the displays in the house, an old favourite that I had grown as standards in the Dahlia beds two jobs earlier, Eupatorium atrorubens - not the best specimen in terms of shape, but I could propagate from it -

I was clinging on tenaciously to some reminder of happiness. I placed my plant on the rotten boards of the greenhouse bench and hoped we would both survive.