IN WHICH I RESCUE A POT PLANT

The other day we were discussing how the recession was affecting businesses. Our own little label business, now nearing its year end, looks as if it will come in about on budget, which is to say slightly down on the year before. But then labels are a declining industry.

Label firms seem to be dropping like flies and catalogues of their redundant equipment, for sale at knock down prices, drop through the letterbox with increasing regularity. Why we no longer need labels when ‘labelling’ seems to be the new found craze of government is another one of life’s impenetrable mysteries.

For us, therefore, managing the decline, is what it is all about. We don’t mind declining slowly. It’s sudden jolts we worry about. A bit like ageing really. We are, though, at the small and simple end of the market, contracting out anything difficult or complex. Operating from home we don’t carry the heavy overheads that are what seem to push so many businesses to the wall. Those and finance costs, of course. So it looks like we shall be battling on into another year.

But sadly, not all businesses will fare so well. In the town one or two have already gone under, including our most handy - and therefore useful - Garden Centre, just off the High Street, and nestling beside the river and its willows. In normal times this would have been full over the Easter weekend with eager gardeners looking to fill their hanging baskets and herbaceous borders.

A couple of months ago the Centre closed suddenly and unexpectedly. No one knew why exactly for it had always seemed a thriving business. There is talk that the landlord may have wanted more money for the lease, or maybe wanted the land for ‘development.’ But who knows what to believe? Maybe competing with the B and Q’s of this world for an industrial supply of petunias and nasturtiums is a mug’s game.

Anyway, the fact remains that this thriving and bustling hub of town activity, where you would meet neighbours between the Vietnamese ceramics or over the rails of clematis, where you would rush down on a Sunday afternoon to buy an extra trellis or set of bamboo canes, has gone the way of all things mortal. Now it is just a sad and empty yard, full of decaying pallets, litter and collapsing sheds. All the plants have gone, the stock of fertilisers and watering cans, likewise. It all looks very woebegone.

Wandering home a couple of evenings ago, on my way back from my daily trip to the Post Office to despatch parcels of labels, something made me divert along the path that runs past the old place. Past the little gate which fiercely said ‘No Entry’ - you were supposed to go in via the shop part which has now been leased to the Antiques Centre - which was not barred but in fact wide open. So I went in and had one of those idle moments of wandering around vacantly trying to remember all I had bought there in happier times.

Yes, here was where they kept the trees, here the climbers, here the water plants and those pond liners, here the stand of rubbishy rhubarb. Not a long wander: I was half-conscious that some uniformed (or even non-uniformed) jobsworth might turn up to enquire what I thought I was doing and automatically suspect that as I was clutching my now empty parcel bag, I must be someone clearly up to no good.

So driven by a mounting feeling of illicitness growing vaguely in my nether regions, I turned around to wander out again. I suppose I had been looking for some souvenir, something to remember the place by. Two months ago perhaps, had I been alert, there might have been any number of discarded bargains to be had; but today all that remained were plastic pots, polythene and broken pallets. Or so it seemed. For then I saw something - a pot with something still in it - lying on its side in a heap of rubbish that had been swept into a corner. Whatever the something was it looked pretty dead.

It still had its label: Pennisetum, it said, with instructions in half a dozen languages; dwarf tufted grass producing pretty colourful (well, whitish) tufts of something or other in the summer. Would it ever do so again, I wondered? For the whole thing looked pretty dead. As if the pot had lain on its side all winter and the plant had shrivelled from drought. Just dead grass, wasn’t it?

Nevertheless I thought I detected a small green shoot - a patch of greenness anyway - so I scooped it up and brought it home. Ever since, at a young age, I learned the parable of the lost sheep, things rescued have always had a particular place in my affections. Into the parcel bag it went and home it came.

It was pot bound, of course, and looked way past its sell by date: a dense thicket of straws in a small pot. But I have since re-potted it and may even plant it out on the lawn. It may be my imagination but I think it’s looking happier.