Stone Crop

29 September 2024

Heavy rains have brought out the stones again. Bone white and dove grey, the storm has washed away the summer dust and left them gleaming.

Once, people thought fields grew stones. We now know that their slow emergence is the result of water freezing, expanding and thawing in the soil, but this makes their arrival no less magical. No less useful. Once, gathering stones would have been the simplest way to make a garden path. Once, before private cars and online delivery, we were resourceful and used whatever the garden gave.

I get my bucket and begin to collect them, as I have done since I was a child.

At my parents’ house I often picked stones. Little bodies crawl into little spaces, and little fingers pick the smallest stones. Soon, I understood every inch of that garden – hot dry places, cool wet places, the routes where the rats ran. Tiny stones became gravel to top the plant pots. Bigger stones filled gaps in the rockery. While investigating the mystery of a mouldy room one day, my father discovered hundreds of pea-sized balls of quartz stuffed into the airbricks. A quiet child is a busy child.

These days, in my own garden, I use the stones to dress a damp border where Lady’s-mantle thrives alongside Red-campion and empires of woodlice expand their colonies. Smooth brown stones appear here overnight – they are Earthballs blooming among the rocks. When I kick them, they roll away like shrivelled potatoes, trailing filaments. I will not touch them with my hands; these fungi are toxic. Masquerading as edibles, they are reportedly the second most common cause of mushroom poisoning in the UK.[i]

Up at the house, the other Stonecrops, the Sempervivums, bask in the sun by the back door. They form mats of stiff rosettes, dark red and waxy against a bright white marble mulch. Like the Earthballs, they have mastered the art of holding on tight to very little. Unlike the Earthballs, if I pick off the ‘chicks’ they will set down their roots almost anywhere, the thinner the soil the better. Sempervivums are houseleeks, that neither prevent nor allow a house to leak. In Anglo-Saxon, ‘leác’ meant plant – they are ‘house plants’.[ii]

These Stonecrops would never survive in the dank places where I reap my stone harvest. My stone crop was cultivated in the silence of the dark earth. It has ridden on the backs of worms. It is a gift from the garden and means more to me than any decorative aggregate bought at a store or ordered online. Milenia in the making, it has travelled the underworld to reach us.

[i] ‘Earthballs’, Wild Food UK, 2024. Accessed: 27.09.2024. Available at: https://www.wildfooduk.com/mushroom-guide/common-earth-ball

[ii] ‘Up on the Rooftops’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014. Accessed: 27.09.2024. Available at: https://www.metmuseum.org/articles/up-on-the-rooftops