Real gardeners and Good Friday shopping

Camelia Paradise Joan flowering in my garden today

I doubt that gardeners need to go plant shopping on Good Friday. Most of the work gardening is in digging and weeding and pruning and mulching and watering. Being able to put a new plant in the ground is just icing on the cake; something that can take 5 to 15 minutes once everything else is done.  Real gardeners always have something to do it their gardens; if they can't get to the shops then it doesn't matter, there's always work to be done, the shops can always wait.

So, it seems to me almost unbelievable that it is a great inconvenience to gardeners if they can't get to the garden centre to buy plants on a Good Friday once a year.  Why not wait until Saturday? Don't they already have plants that they've bought earlier and not planted, or other things they can do in the garden in preparation? Or can't they appreciate just having a day where they are not gardening?

Or are the people that visit garden centres on Good Friday not gardeners and just desperate to shop even if it's only just for plants? If that is the case, surely it would be better for garden centres to retain the status quo where most other shops don't open, thus staying an oasis in the Easter desert for the distraught shopper who has nowhere else to go on a day where nothing much else is open.  Once Good Friday is turned into just another shopping day, the garden centres will lose their edge, even if they no longer have to pay a fine for opening on a non-shopping day.

However, logic appears to have no place in this debate.  It's turned into a war between the secularists on the one side and those that just want everyone to be able to have a holiday together with those that actually celebrate Good Friday on the other.  What is wrong with retaining a holiday tradition of no shopping?  It seems as if any link to religious traditions just drives some people nuts.

Related links : Nursery enjoys a good Friday and Garden centre says Easter trade essential

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This year, I couldn't do much of anything on Good Friday as I was sick.  Nausea and a headache will do that to me.   Instead of being tempted by gardening, I just watched The Passion of the Christ and shared in the suffering.

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My current gardening project is putting a buxus hedge to box in my roses that live on the outside the bedroom walls.  This is my attempt to make the whole area look tidier, and especially hide the weeds if I haven't got around to getting to them for a while.  As you may be able to see below, I haven't finished.

Here are my extra buxus plants in little pots that I bought a couple of weeks ago that I haven't planted yet.  Can you see three of them behind the plants on the right?  They are there to remind me that I still need to plant them.

This is why I haven't finished planting everything yet - mounds of excess dirt that I need to remove from expanding the garden area by digging out the lawn.  I need somewhere to put the dirt, but I haven't figured out where yet.  Or I have, I just need to do more work to put the dirt in a particular place.

I don't have enough buxus plants, either.  I've been moving them over from the other side of the garden  where I had some bigger ones, but then I hit tree roots in this section and so can't dig deep enough to plant the bigger plants.

It's going to look like crap for a while, probably a few years as buxus plants grow very slowly, but I'll live with it.  Meanwhile, here is my attempt to get more buxus plants, stick the cuttings into the potting mix and see if they'll take.  It's worked on smaller cuttings, but I need bigger ones!

As might be obvious, there is a lot of patience involved in gardening as well. It takes time for tiny plants to get big enough so they actually look like a hedge, and even for cuttings to grow roots if you're that kind of a masochist. The patience required gets you through waiting for plants to grow as well as waiting another day for the garden centre to open. Those that can't wait just aren't cut out to be gardeners.