18.7.24 – wild strawberries and crannog weeds
in the garden
At some point a runner must have escaped me and now the wild strawberries are reaching across the garden, under the knobby knees of the Taunton Dean kale, through the tender green oregano, even anchoring themselves to the horrible fake grass. In the pot where they began, they have been fruiting happily all summer, with miniature berries that begin as knots armoured by tiny needles, maturing into a soft red-pink purse of barely-solid flesh, which can merely be pressed between tongue and tooth to savour the most intensely strawberry-flavoured pulp. When I forage around for one or two every other day, I often think of Charlotte Mendelson when she wrote of them, “If they were any bigger, humans would die of pleasure.”
They are one of many plants that (unlike the tomatoes, beans, and basil) have responded with nothing but generosity in this cooler-than-expected summer, along with the lettuces, brassicas, nasturtium, the raspberry, red-veined sorrel, and, honestly, the nettles. It’s a funny feeling to know these plants currently in my garden as I encounter many of them again, two thousand years ago, in Jennifer Miller’s 1997 PhD thesis about the plant remains found in and around Oakbank Crannog in Loch Tay. A crannog is an artificial island created in a body of water, and were once widespread in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales from as early as the Neolithic (4100 to 2500 BC) to as late at the 18th century. Oakbank is one of 18 crannogs discovered in Loch Tay, and analysis of the timbers that held the structure over the water showed construction began in the Early Iron Age (775-510 BC). We know from its amazingly preserved material artefacts (a dogrose-wood whistle! a clay vessel with the fingerprint of its maker!) and plant remains that it was used as a dwelling, and its inhabitants were farmers.
(The material artefacts of Oakbank can be explored, along with amazing living archaeology projects, at the newly-expanded Scottish Crannog Centre in Kenmore. For a real mind-boggle, do view the 2,500 year old timber posts and carbonised hazelnuts there and then immediately visit the still-living Fortingall Yew a few miles away, which is older than the preserved posts by another 2,500 years.)
The most significant plant remains found at Oakbank include the seeds of cloudberry, a relative of the blackberry, which only grows in specific mountainous and moorland environments in the Northern Hemisphere. It rarely shows up in the fossil record and its presence here indicates the dwellers of the crannog would have foraged in mountainous peatland several hours’ walk away. Also included were seeds of poppy (papaver somniferum) and flax, which were fairly exotic and suggested they were cultivated on a small-scale, possibly in a garden-like system. Extremely important and interesting finds, but I find myself most moved by the wild strawberries (fragaria vesca) that would have reached out opportunistically in sunny fringes just the same as in my garden, and the nettles (urtica dioica) that would have prickled in fields and woodland edges the way they poke through my jostaberry, and the red-veined sorrel (rumex sanguineous) that surely would have popped up in any bare soil at the slightest chance.
The nettles, sorrel, raspberries, and poppy seeds at Oakbank (along with broad-leaved plantain, cleavers, self-heal, fat hen, chickweed, and field mustard) pop up again two thousand years later in the medieval drain of Paisley Abbey. The drain was excavated around 1990 and the paper on its plant remains by Camilla Dickson (a legend) was published in 1995. It offers a snapshot of both cultivated and “weedy” plants grown in Scotland in the 15th century, many of which grow in my garden too: apple (malus domestica), kale (brassica oleracea v. acephela), fig (ficus carica), alliums (impossible to determine the exact variety), elder (sambucus nigra), spiny sowthistle (sonchus asper), and yarrow (achillea millefolium), amongst others. I return to this particular paper quite often, perennially amazed by the quantity of seed, fruit, and sometimes leaf/stem fragments from the gardens, riverbanks, and surrounding countryside that survived in the airless silt of the river that I have lived near for the last six years.
There are two thousand years between the crannog and the monastery, and more than 500 years between the monastery and me, and all of us in this place through those millennia have known the seedy pleasure of a wild raspberry, blousy poppies full of rolling bumblebees, the amusing grip of cleavers, the acid tang of sorrel, the mustardy bite of brassica leaves. I find it grounding, in this uneasy summer especially, to forage for little squishy strawberries, to cut young leaves of red-veined sorrel, to push the nettle gingerly out of the way, and feel the longevity of their presence in this landscape, the tight weft of our human relationship with them despite everything.
in the past
In both the studies above, there is much talk of weeds. In June, I explored a little how the concept of “weeds” as an over-arching category of unwanted and unquestioningly hostile plants is a comparatively new one, and how whether or not a plant was a “noxious herb” in early medieval Europe depended very much on context. I have been mulling over this ever since, and wondering if every time a writer of gardens and agriculture through the centuries ever complained about another’s unkempt plot, or pontificated on the moral virtues of weeding, if they might actually be gesturing to (and passing judgment on) polyculture systems of growing.
[Polyculture being a system in which many types of plants are grown all together, versus the monocultural swathes of only corn, only wheat, only strawberries, only tomatoes that we see in agriculture today.]
In her 1988 introduction to John Reid’s 1687 The Scots’ Gard’ner (which I share an excerpt from at the beginning of every month), writer and historian Annette Hope inconveniently did not cite her sources when she wrote, “It seems strange to us now, but at the time many people believed that weeds kept the ground warm and supplied it with nourishment.” I haven’t found any other evidence of this yet for the early modern age, but can’t let go of this tantalising glimpse of such and ecologically-sound premise. We know that in other places, cultures, and contexts (including today, with much wild-life friendly/polyculture edible growing), the plants that pop up around a primary crop have been kept as convenient forage for food, materials, and medicine. We know that many “weeds” are not inherently harmful to us or to surrounding plants, and that they provide useful ground cover which prevents loss of moisture, protects from extreme heat, inhibits erosion, and draws up nutrients from deeper in the soil. We know, too, that “weedy” plants are crucial to the survival of many insect species, and keeping them around is vital to supporting biodiversity in the face of climate collapse.
But is it possible to see evidence for intentionally polyculture ways of growing in historic and archaeological records in the British Isles? In his paper for a conference report in 1988 (which, yes, I did have to buy the monograph from AbeBooks and am happy to send you a scan of the article if you’re interested!), Martin Jones outlines the evidence that peoples of prehistoric Britain did not have a strict crop-weed distinction. He gestures to both Western and non-Western agricultural practices that not only have important ecological benefits like preventing erosion and effects of drought, but mirror some archaeobotanical findings in Europe that illustrate a world of diverse plant life indivisible from the growing (and eating) of grain. Supporting this theory, one of the most significant findings from Miller’s thesis on the Oakbank crannog is the discovery that the farmers who lived there cut their barley, emmer, and spelt close to the ground when harvesting, as identified by the seeds of low-growing plants mixed with the grain detritus. They then brought all the “weeds” together with the principal crop to the crannog, where they were sorted from one another and processed in the doorway, with the “waste” plants likely tossed to sheep or goats on the gangway for animal fodder.
Miller identifies twenty-four plant varieties that she categorises as “arable weeds” found with remains of primary grain crops. Out of these, I counted 14 that have known medicinal uses and 13 that are edible to varying degrees, with a lot of overlap between the two. Later on, she counts five plants as potential potherbs (plants for the porridge pot): nettles, lambs quarters/fat hen/goosefoot (chenopodium album), chickweed (stellaria media), spiny sow thistle, and nipplewort (lapsana communis), with the latter five also having been classed as arable weeds. I have my suspicions that such potherbs would also have included plants like the new leaves of field mustard (brassica rapa campestris) and cleavers.
The fact that so many of these “weeds” mixed in with primary crop remains are identified by their seeds suggests that they were not weeded out before maturing during the growing months; we could chalk this up to labour-saving, and to the more generally-accepted thought that these plants served some purpose as secondary harvest for animal fodder and their seed supplemented nutrition in the grain harvest. But I do wonder if they were foraged at earlier stages of their lives, to be added to the pot of barley porridge. Miller notes that we cannot be entirely certain to what purpose all the plants found at the crannog were put, particularly because there are no remains of any latrines/human effluent that would definitively record what people ate. This has not stopped me from wondering if the smaller-scale of Iron Age field systems had more in common with gardening than is generally suggested, both in terms of size and of care, permitting a polyculture approach. I wonder if maybe these many greens were relied upon for their flavour, nutrition, and dependable appearance without needing to save and sow seed. I wonder, most of all, what the Oakbank people’s food would have tasted like, whether they nibbled on fat hen and the occasional wild strawberry while doing other garden tasks, if their pottage was ultimately very similar to the pottage of their descendants in the late medieval and early modern eras.
I think knowing and imagining these sorts of things is an important step in normalising types of growing and land management that feel “new” to us, that go against all our conditioning to make tidy lines and clear the soil. There are historic and archaeological precedents for engaging with the land in these “new”, more sustainable ways, and I think the more familiar we are with them, the more possible it is to see ourselves in the context of our natural world, to imagine new-old ways of caring for both human and non-human life.
archaeology AND gardening! yes please!!