“The archivist called, earlier. She says they’re opening the herbaria today.” Till sets down the teapot with a clink. It’s jarring; ruinous of her nana’s cultivated peace. “Late notice, but you know what she’s like. She wondered if you’d like to come.”
Her nana takes a careful sip from her mug. “Today?”
Till grew up surrounded by the ghosts of a civilisation, but this is where she feels it the most. Her nana’s house is cluttered with pre-collapse objects. The mugs alone should, by rights, be entombed as a museum collection.
“Yup. Maybe once we’ve finished the tea, we can go. Apparently, some of the books haven’t been opened in our lifetimes.”
“Like everything else that’s brought to that dusty office of hers,” her nana says, after a time. “It’s kind of her to think of me. I do so miss the flowers.”
Till is confused. From her nana’s porch, there’s a verdancy that’s always suited itself to her own sampling. Buds spring forth from the loamy earth. Moss has colonised the edges of the solar panels. If there’s one thing that the little house isn’t in need of, its more flowers —more green.
“I could bring you flowers if you like. Tomato flowers? We have those in the greenhouse —the yellow star ones? Or like squash blossoms? Or chives?”
“Not those, cariad.” Nana takes another sip of tea. “I miss the old ones. The ones that were just to look at. We used to have a pot of lavender, just outside the kitchen windowsill. My granny used it to coax the bees in. I think that was back when we first started getting worried about them. The bees.” Her hands shake around her mug, and she sets it down clumsily on the saucer. A wrinkle forms between her eyebrows. “Or was it? Maybe that’s not right. So many losses. I never thought I’d forget how lavender smells.”
Till mouths out the syllables slowly, wracking her mind for any recognition, but finds nothing. “When we go to the archivist, we can ask her if it was deposited.”
Her nana has gone quiet and somehow elsewhere, her cup of tea only half-drunk.
“My bones are too weary today, I think, to walk so far,” she says, finally. “But do give my love to Diana.”
“We’re not —not anymore—”
This breaks her nana out from her memory-trance, but it’s only to wither Till with a glare. “I know, Tilly. I wish you two would talk.”
It would’ve been easy enough to blip a little message to the archivist on her pad, but her building is only a twenty-minute walk from the neobotany labs. Till expects to relay her nana’s apologies through intercom static at the door. But —weirdly —her keycard swipes green, still coded with the PIN for the archivist’s office.
The curtained room is lit dimly by a solar-powered desk lamp, picking out the bird-boned angles of the archivist’s form; the straight, soil-dark hair sheared off at her jawbone. Till’s footsteps were always going to be loud in this room.
The archivist doesn’t give Till annoyance, let alone anger—only a flat, affected boredom. “Oh. It’s you.”
“Hi, Diana.”
“Stop.”
Till halts.
“No closer. I won’t have you getting dirt on my specimens, you wretch.”
When Till looks down at her palms there’s earth powdered into the crevice of her heart line, worn into her callused fingers. She wipes her hands down her thighs. She’ll change, anyway, when she gets to her own lab.
Behind Diana, a book with rubbed-away cloth binding is splayed open, plants pressed between the heavy pages.
“What are those?” Till was never a model history student, but she can still tell it’s not one of the languages normally spoken around the scholar buildings or the farmsteads. Calthus palustris, Helianthus annuus, Lavandula—was that…?
Diana blocks her view. “Lavandula was named from the ancient Latin lavare – to wash.”
“Alright, fine,” Till says.
“The sink’s outside.”
“I know.”
“There’s a canister of gel, too.”
“I’m going.”
Till returns with scrubbed hands, but Diana does not look any more impressed. “Why are you here alone? I asked you to bring Ffion.”
“Thought it was easier to deliver the news in person. Nana can’t make it today.”
Diana exhales. “A pity. Her help with anything pre-collapse is always indispensable.”
“My fault, I think.”
They watch each other. Diana folds her arms. Till offers her a smile. “Well, since nana’s not here, can I look—”
The archivist prickles. “As you’re already standing over them, yes.”
They’ve preserved as much as possible: roots, stems, flowers. The leaves are twisted in places, for a future audience to admire the fine hairs on the undersides. A little paper packet is stapled in, holding long-deceased seeds.
She takes her time, tasting the archivist’s irritation between them. There’s a bond still, drawing from her to Diana. A thread that she’s not quite ready to sever.
Till attempts nonchalance: “D’you think I could take samples from some of these?”
“You’re a neobotanist,” says Diana. “Which means you’re supposed to be digging around in the soil. Outside.”
“Yeaaaaah,” she says. “I am. But if you can spare a sample, it might be interesting to look at the DNA. Sequence it, you know. Map the changes made from distant relatives—these —to the current flora. See if there’s any link.”
Diana stares at the page, where the tiny blue petals of Myosotis sylvatica are nearly overwhelmed by their stalks. The typeface—this one’s new (-ish)—says they were gathered from an east facing slope in an open meadow, ca. 49°51’N, 114°02’W, during the summer of 1978. A full generation before Till’s nana was even born.
“How large a sample?” asks Diana, finally.
“Half the size of your littlest fingernail should be enough.”
Till carries a pack of glass phials on her person by rote, but Diana is the one to segment off the flowers (using a scalpel from her drawer that Till’s glad she didn’t know about). She makes sure Diana takes a piece of Lavandula angustifolia. This one, she labels herself, and tucks into the front pocket of her dungarees.
Her nana told her part of how it went, with the collapse. The rest—the bits of it that gnawed too hard—were supplied by Till’s science teacher. Nana had been born to a world near as verdant as this new one. “By the time I was in my twenties, you’d hear people remark on how they never saw butterflies anymore. Said casually, just like that, as if it wasn’t a devastation.”
Drought and flooding killed off a lot of the plants that still grew in the scrubby ground. By the time anyone thought to keep anything back—tuck even a couple of seeds away into the plastic husk of a soda bottle—all they had left to scrape from was whatever remained on the supermarket shelves.
(It had taken her nana an hour to explain the concept of supermarkets, because Till had peppered her with endless questions. The idea had really messed with her head—still did, if she thought about it too much.)
Humanity—even wounded, the universe’s scrappiest warriors—fought back from the brink. In all of Till’s memory, the world’s been as green as it was in her nana’s youth, if changed slightly by the struggle. The glasshouses thrive. In the past decade, the soil’s been happy enough that fields are being sown outdoors. Not the vast monocultures she’s seen in her nana’s books. They’ve learned from those mistakes. The crops are tentatively planted out in small patchworks. The hedgerows rustle with life.
Till does not go to the farmsteads that day. Instead, she chaperones the archivist’s samples all the way to the neobotany labs. Once the case is deposited in her freezer, she settles herself down in the greenhouses and ponders.
Nana has told her so many times about how research worked, before; the relentless filing of forms to get more grants, more funding to keep the lights on and the equipment running even as the clock ticked on their old world. But Till’s been born to a better future. She rummages under the leaves and picks a strawberry, and then another; sucks the red juice off her fingers. A bee hums. The sun glows through the glass roof and heats the back of her neck.
She takes out the little vial of Lavandula and rolls it between finger and thumb.
“What did you smell like?” she says. She knows she could look it up, if she was so inclined. If she did, Till would find a never-ending list of words ending in -enes and -ols, 0.20% this and 2.73% that. A formula, precise to two significant figures, to bring back her nana’s memories.
The idea comes later, when she’s mashed up the dried plant material and sieved out the DNA and the sequencer is humming, spilling out letters at her.
In Till’s early days in the lab, when they’d finally found the circuitry the sequencer craved, they’d put all the vegetables through it as a test. Nine of them had come back as the same species—bred over generations to change the hue of their leaves or the length of their stalks. Even pre-collapse, scientists were purposefully engineering plants. Replacing the bits in their genetics that made them vulnerable to pests. Changing their colours, simply for fun.
But did anyone ever resurrect a plant, in the before-times?
Her mind latches onto the idea and runs with it.
“Brought you notes,” says Till, waiting in Diana’s door frame. “Looks like they’re genuine.”
“Thanks, Till.” Diana’s tone does not agree with her words. She doesn’t look up from her magnifier.
When she gets back into the neobotany lab, Till coaxes DNA into a virus and infects mint seeds (a useful byproduct of someone ransacking the herb aisle during the collapse). There’s already a plant lying sleeping in there, but the next generation will be carved out from the inside to carry the entire code for Lavandula.
The next time she sees Diana, Till is given a rack of herbaria samples. She can’t tell how Diana feels about it, but she does invite herself for lunch, and ends up staying for half the afternoon picking at her latest volumes.
Two months slip by.
Till’s receiver is tucked between ear and shoulder as she gently transplants new seedlings to bigger pots. She tries not to feel hope, but the leaves are more elongated than the last generation; the plants slower-growing.
“Diana says you’re collaborating,” says her nana, voice thin against her ear.
“We are.” Till presses her thumb against the seam between the old dirt and the new, mixing it together.
Her nana laughs through the speaker. “Is that what the young people call it, these days?”
“Nana! No.” She finishes with the pots and begins bleeping commands into the incubator, setting up the temperature cycles. She wishes desperately that she knew what she was doing. “It’s just part of her cataloguing. That’s all. In fact, I need to finish the latest batch. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The summer goes by in a sticky sweep. The fruit picker’s rust-blocked, so they bring their ladders out and pick peaches and plums by hand. Her nana gathers jam-jars from everyone and simmers the fruit down on the stove. For weeks, Till eats jam on toast for at least one of her meals.
She invites Diana to come and help, but only once. The archivist politely declines. Till feels stupid for being disappointed, but reminds herself it’s a work partnership. Jam would get the pages sticky. Colleagues don’t normally want to taste the sweetness of each other’s mouths.
She returns to her work as the season cools, and for a time does not see the archivist at all. Until one day, she looks up from a tray of soil samples to find Diana standing in the doorway to her office.
“Hello,” she says, stiffly. It’s as if any sign of friendliness would cost her dearly.
“What are you doing out of the archives?” Till says. “Sorry—I mean—hi.”
“I came to pick up the newest data,” she says. No, you didn’t, Till thought, but she’d let Diana play pretend if she wanted.
Till peels off her gloves, and marvels at how entirely sweaty her hands have become. “I didn’t know you knew where I worked. I mean—I’m surprised you found it.”
“I visited here before, didn’t I?”
“No. Never.” When they were together, they’d eat their lunch in the archives building. Till would bring raspberries over from the greenhouses, yellow tartness cupped in her palms. Diana had never seemed interested in finding out where they came from. After a while, she’d stopped asking her to learn. “Take a seat. I’m just finishing something.”
Diana perches on Till’s laboratory stool and takes the room in. Heat rises at the back of Till’s neck—hugely aware of her own chaos clashing against Diana’s sparse frame—but she reins her mind in, tidying away the soil samples.
The archivist’s voice cuts through Till’s thoughts. “What are these?” The Lavandula stalks had grown slowly, but after eight months they’re impossible to hide. If Till’s being honest, she’s never wanted to. Purple flowers are beginning to peek out from their buds. She can barely keep her eyes from them.
“Nothing. Work in progress.”
“Tell me about it.”
“What?”
“Tell me about your life—or at least, this part of it. You used to. They look well-tended, so you must be spending a decent amount of time on them. Is it a new cultivar?”
Diana’s gaze is pleading, and Till feels strangely vulnerable when she says, “Don’t you recognise it?”
“Should I?”
Till sighs. “It’s—oh, you’ll be angry.”
“Why would I be angry?”
“It’s Lavandula.”
“You found it in the wild?”
“No—”
“Then how?”
Till explains the seeds. The late nights, head pillowed against the growth tray to make sure the recycled incubator didn’t shut off when the generator power-surged; the tuning of the automatic watering systems, the mixing of the soil to exact quantities to get a cocktail compatible with life.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” says Diana, when she’s finished.
Till can’t parse the tone of the archivist’s voice, so she shrugs, exhausted. “Neither did I.”
“Can I?”
Till isn’t sure what Diana wants to do, but she nods. “Of course.”
The archivist tucks her hair behind her ears and puts her face up to the pot, sniffs the flowers, long and deep. “That’s—”
“Beautiful,” says Till. “Yes. Do you think nana will like it?”
Diana stills. “All this was for Ffion?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t just mess around in the soil, do you?”
“Nope.”
“Then,” Diana breathes. “Why did you let me think you did?”
“I didn’t,” says Till. Their working relationship has been good, these past months. She’s very aware that they’re coming closer to a place that would ruin that—a place that she can’t come back from. “You wouldn’t let me in close enough to show you. Six months we were together, and I never saw where you slept. You never let me know when you were tired, or angry—whether you were bored of hearing about my work, even though I know I could go on for hours.”
“I’m sorry,” said Diana.
And then, “It’s hard, when you’ve been on your own for so long, to know how to ask for anything.”
And then, slowly, “I didn’t come for the data.”
“I know.”
“I came because I wanted to ask… do you think we could try again?”
They wait until Lavandula is thriving in the greenhouses before they summon Till’s nana to see it. “Come on,” says Till, Nana’s fingers threaded through hers. “You spend so much time in the archives with Diana, you could at least come to visit me every now and then.”
“Diana’s always interested in what I have to say,” says her nana.
“Am I not interested?”
“Well, yes,” says her nana. “But naturally, my stories are key to her work—oh, I wish you wouldn’t rush ahead so, Tilly.”
“I’ve got something to show you.”
As always, her nana looks delighted at the fug of the greenhouse air, at the petrichor-scent around them. “Close your eyes,” says Till. No use making a ceremony out of it: she crushes a purple flower between her fingertips and holds it under her nana’s nose.
“What have you—”
She stiffens, and opens her eyes as Till exclaims, “Nana, you’re ruining the game!”
“That’s my granny’s perfume,” she says. “She used to rub it into her wrists, first thing in the morning. If I was patient, she’d let me have a bit too.” Her nana’s voice becomes very wobbly. Tears stream down her cheeks. “I can see the room again—her awful tablecloth with chickens on it. I haven’t thought of that for years. Let me see what you’ve done.”
Recognition sparks when Till brings her to the bush. “You found it?”
Till finds she is too choked up with tears to answer.
“She made it,” says Diana, bringing a tea tray through the doors. “For you.”
“It’ll be another couple of months before it’s alright to take cuttings,” says Till, when she can get words out. “But I’ve already earmarked the first one for you. If you put it in the kitchen windowsill, it should do fine with the light levels there, at least for the beginning. Later, we’ll try it outside.”
Once they’ve gone through three pots of tea, and her nana has spilled out more stories of her bygone world, and they’re all out of tears, Till moves to clear the tray.
“Ah—not so fast,” says her nana. “You can’t sneak away like that, Tilly. You’ve distracted me with this wonder that you’ve done, and so I haven’t asked. How is your… collaboration going?”
“Successfully,” says Diana. “We’re actually starting more projects.”
“Preserving the post-collapse flora,” interjects Till, before her nana has to ask. “Well, that’s one of them. The other—we’ll be resurrecting more plants.”
Diana doesn’t draw away as Till takes her hand. In fact, she remains remarkably composed. “We thought we’d keep going with the flowers. The next one will be Myosotis sylvatica.”
“Forget-me-nots?” says Till’s nana, and she beams.
Kit Calvert (she/her) is a speculative fiction writer and scientist based in Edinburgh. Her work is heavily influenced by her Scottish background, with focuses on the trials and tribulations of academia, domestic magics, and celebrating queerness. To stay up to date with her work, visit kitcalvert.com.
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