Back to Work

I returned to work at the Forest today. After taking the summer off it was good to get back and see my old friends at the nursery and schlep around some heavy wet flats of plants! After packing a few things to ship in the morning I spent the rest of the day organizing the many varieties of species camellias that we carry. That involved gathering them from all over the nursery and organizing them in alphabetical order in 5 rows in the greenhouse. I was dedicated to getting this done as last year they were scattered everywhere and each time we had to pull one for a shipping order, a major search would ensue, walking up and down the aisles of the greenhouses trying to find one of the tiny plants, all with strange names like tungienensis, caudata, nitidissima or my least favorite- crappnelliana.

There is something quite rewarding about having a job before you and getting it done, being able to stand back at the end of the day and see your work accomplished. Not all the work I do is like that, straight forward, it's one of the reasons I like the nursery.

I've been checking out some cool bugs lately, the one up top is from our mountain trip and the bottom one is in the garden, eating the leaves of my fennel. I wonder if that swallowtail caterpillar feels like I do at the end of a working day when he looks back up that stalk and sees he's eaten all the leaves off a stem?