The plant labels are printed from the stock system, a label per plant, with the name and the barcode and the price. Every night the printer prints one label. The plant is a rose, a variety that is not in our system, not in any catalogue we buy from, with a name that is a woman's first name and a surname. In the morning the label is in a pot in the rose section, and in the pot is a rose, and it is not one of ours, and by the time it flowers there is a woman standing in front of it who does not buy it.
I am the plant buyer at a garden centre and the label printer is the last thing I check before I go, and it is never empty in the morning.
The printer.
A label printer on the stock system, in the plant office, that prints a label for every plant that comes in: name, variety, barcode, price. It prints in the day. At night it is off, because the system is off.
Every night it prints one label.
The label.
A rose. The variety is a name, a woman's first name and a surname, in the style breeders use when a rose is named for somebody. It is not in our system. It is not in the catalogue of any grower we buy from. It is not, I have looked, in the register of roses, which has every rose ever named, and it is not there, which means it was never registered, which means it was a rose somebody bred and named and never sold.
The price on the label is what we charge for a good rose. The barcode scans, to nothing.
In the morning the label is in a pot. In the rose section, on the end of a bench, in a pot that is one of ours, in compost that is ours, and in the pot is a rose. A bush, healthy, in leaf, pruned properly, and it is not a rose I have ever seen, and I have seen a lot of roses.
The woman.
In the summer, when it flowered, which it did, a pink I could not name, scented, a woman came in. Elderly, on a stick, alone, and she went to the rose section and stood in front of it, and she read the label, and she stood there for a long time, and she put her hand out and touched a flower, and she did not pick it up, and she went, and she came back the next day, and stood, and went.
She comes most days now. She has never bought it. I have never asked.
What has been checked.
The printer, replaced. It prints the label.
The rose section, at night, by me, at the end of the bench. The pot was there, empty, because I had emptied it. And at about midnight there was the sound of somebody potting, the compost, and then the sound of a rose going into a pot, which is a sound you know if you have done it, the roots, the settling, and the firming, and a man's breath, the breath of somebody kneeling on a concrete floor who is not young, and then the label, which I heard go into the pot, the small push of the plastic stake into compost, and the man got up, slowly, and his knees went, and he said something, one word, and it was the name on the label, the first name, and he said it the way you say the name of somebody who is in the next room.
Who.
The nursery, before it was a centre, bred roses. Not many. The nurseryman had a bed of seedlings at the back and every few years one was good enough to keep, and the old staff say he named one, once, for his wife, and grew it in the garden of the house on the site, and never sold it, because it was hers, and when the house was bought and knocked down the rose was lost with the garden.
His wife is alive. She is the woman with the stick. The old staff knew her at once. She lives in the town. She is very old. And she comes to the rose section and stands in front of a rose that was named for her and that she has not seen for forty years, and reads her own name on a label, and touches it, and does not take it home.
He is potting it up for her. Every night. So it is there when she comes.
What is done about it.
The label is on the printer's log every night and the rose is on the bench and it is not on the stock list and it cannot be sold because the barcode goes nowhere, and the area manager has asked me why I have an unsaleable plant on the end of the rose bench, and I have said, it's not for sale.
What I do.
I buy the plants.
She does not take it home because she cannot carry it. I understood that the third time I watched her. A woman of that age on a stick cannot carry a rose in a pot to the bus, and she has not asked, because she is not the sort who asks, and he cannot carry it for her, because he is not the sort who can.
So I did. I asked her, one afternoon, where she lived, and I said we delivered, which we do not, and I took the rose in the van, that evening, to a flat with a balcony, and I planted it in a pot on the balcony, and she stood in the door and watched me, and when I had done she said, he bred that for me, and I said, I know, and she said, he'll be pleased it's home, and I said, I think he is.
The printer printed a label that night. It has every night since. The rose section has a rose on the end of the bench in the morning that is not one of ours. He is still potting it up. I think he does not know it has gone home, and I think I am going to have to tell him, and I have not worked out how you tell a man who is potting up a rose at midnight for his wife that his wife has it, and I am going to go and stand at the bench tonight, and say it, and see what he does.