28.2.25 - haunting the garden

For months, all I’ve done is look. I’ve paced up and down the garden path as the dog sniffed out mouse tracks, lightly surveying the progress of hibernation in brown stems, black compost, grey bark. The garden, as it does every year, split into two planes of existence around December: outside, it sat in the cold sideways sun, sideways rain, sideways wind, sleeping a cold reptilian sleep as insects and eggs with the whole summer inside them waited in the hollows of its bare brown bones. But in my head, it lived three or four seasons all at once, green the way it was two years ago and then greener and taller in a vision I’ve sketched out in the margins of a to-do list. As I walked the garden in its flat winter stillness, the two planes overlapped like ghosts in an empty house. My head remembered the buzzing density of insects in summer, projecting memories of darting hoverflies and rumbling bees, while in the present tense the silence was broken only by the robin twitching through the verbena stems or a pigeon landing awkwardly on the perennial kale. There was a sense that I am haunting the garden; a lone spectre caught between past and future, remembering things the forthcoming occupants will not. In a few months, when the bees are impatient with me for standing in their way between flowers, I will remember the stillness and think a little huffily, “I was here while you were a speck in your queen! I made all of this ready for you!”

The feeling of haunting follows me in archaeobotanical papers. With the compression of water, silt, peat, and centuries, the mixed debris of a day or a season’s harvesting, eating, and crafting sit for untold ages in the heavy dark, until some archaeologist bends down to dredge and contain the delicate remnants. In Jennifer Miller’s 1997 PhD thesis on the archaeobotany of Oakbank Crannog, a whole Iron Age landscape is pulled up from the depths of Loch Tay. In their thousands of fragments, the oak and alder woodlands, coppiced hazels, foraged berries, dried sloes, gathered grain, and drifting pollens of 2,500 years ago are recalled from the complex mud. Relationships between plants and crannog-dwellers are mapped with astounding detail: grain was cut at ground-level along with the seedheads of plants we consider arable weeds, suggesting a less contentious dynamic than our modern one between cultivated and volunteer plants; the grain was then processed in the doorway of the crannog, and its waste material thrown to the goats or sheep on the crannog gangway; and, most significantly, the presence of flax and opium poppy seeds (both rare in this place, at this time) suggest cultivation at a garden scale, in opposition to the assumed large-scale arable fields supplemented with foraged berries, sloes, and edible greens.

I don’t know why, in these prehistoric discourses, gardens are so often not assumed or suggested. It doesn’t seem outlandish to me that something additional sat between the care of a field system and the careful looking of forage. More recently, researchers have agreed that the transition from foraging societies to agricultural ones would have involved the very first gardens, and acknowledged how interpretation of prehistoric sites in the UK has often failed to consider garden systems. Reading older studies like this thesis, I spend a lot of time projecting the garden as it might have been, based on all these foraged fruits and readily dismissed “weeds”. Why wouldn’t the crannog-dwellers cultivate and encourage the little wild strawberries with their needle-like seeds, and the blackthorns whose sloes were dried to eat in winter (the pits thrown into the loch and plucked out again two millennia later, a little fruit-skin still attached), and the fresh green chickweed, nettles, and wild turnip whose leaves would have been good in the porridge pot? Why not let the goosefoot/fat hen/lambs quarters grow up around the poppies and flax? We have always wanted to bring delicious things closer to the nucleus of the house, to protect them from competitors and halve our own labour. The details recovered from the mud are so textured and their implications so movingly intimate that the crannog-garden grows lush in my mind, and it is a surprise to bump into the sudden obstacle of entomology:

“Insect remains in the form of eggs, beetle fragments and fly pupae were often in association with matrix representing animal litter. Some of these may be as a result of the presence of faeces, but others may correspond to other conditions. It is not the purpose of this study to investigate the invertebrate remains found during sampling, although the benefits of collaboration with an insect expert is recognised.”

I know it’s completely appropriate to omit the description of invertebrate finds in an archaeobotanical work, but I am disappointed nonetheless. The liveliness of the world being built is suddenly cut short, half formed. I realise the crannog-garden in my mind is only a static model, and I had not included the bees, beetles, flies, spiders, and midges that would have brought the land to life. There is an abrupt realisation that a garden is not really alive or, in fact, a garden unless there are living insects, arachnids, and microbes within it; the kind of basic fact that one didn’t really need to think about consciously before, but thinking it now, I remember how there were fewer insects in my garden last summer than I had ever seen in years past. Suddenly there is a bewildering ache, like knowing you need oxygen to breathe and there just isn’t enough, and I feel like I am haunting two empty worlds simultaneously.

Remains of bumblebees and other such pollinators rarely survive in the archaeological record; we can only imagine that they were doing just fine in this Iron Age landscape, which was still densely wooded in parts and filled with wolves, brown bears, lynx, and boars. Today, the situation is frankly dire, as bumblebee species in the UK were recorded at their lowest ever levels in 2024. Our summers are growing quieter by the year; I read the archaeobotany papers like I’m holding my ear to the ground, listening for the noise of all the unwritten insects, birds, and mammals that made the garden louder and livelier than it’s ever been in my lifetime.

Day by day, the distance between the two planes of my garden are growing smaller. The rhubarb leaves are unfurling in a muddy pink and the jostaberry buds are green points on the verge of bursting, all of it ballast drawing the garden in my mind back into place over the garden in the present. I have started sowing seeds (Korean mint, which the pollinators love) and bought my potatoes at the Glasgow Allotments Forum potato day, thinking of the bees that will hang off their flowers come June. Soon, I will start cutting down last year’s stems and leaving them in place to decompose. Soon, I will move the big open compost pile so we can build a greenhouse in its place. Soon, the bumblebee queens will emerge and I will duck out of their way, a deferential ghost.