Sometimes you really do get what you pay for — in this case, good advice, knowledge, and a healthy plant.

I’ve been back to the garden center I worked at in my High School/college years, and it’s sadly morphed from one of the latter sort of garden center to one of the former. The manager I’d worked for left and started her own place — pricier, smaller, but worth it — and the owner probably just went for the bottom line and hired whoever was cheap and available without any sense of whether they cared about plants.

They also don’t hire many high school students either; they seem to be mostly hiring middle aged men from Guatemala (who, I’m sure, need the work, but it makes it hard to ask about perennials). Maybe that’s a function of the job market here; I dunno. It could be that all the kids who were like me are now so busy with all their mandatory after-school activities that they don’t have time for a job. But that’s a shame; I learned so much about plants working there, and think it’s good for kids to have jobs while they’re in high school. But that’s another rant.