Where my roots met their roots…

We wandered through the ruins of Apchon’s castle, its jagged stones holding the weight of centuries. At the base of the hill, in the shimmer of August heat, I found something I hadn’t expected: a garden. Not a decorative display, but a living echo — the kind of garden that might once have sustained those who lived behind the castle walls.

A medieval hortus, reborn in the modern day.

Here were triangular beds arranged like the veins of a leaf, each one carrying a purpose. Medicinal plants for fevers and wounds. Dye plants for cloth. Edibles for the kitchen table. Symbolic flowers for prayer and ritual. Even a small pool, not for beauty but for balance — a sanctuary for the creatures that would keep slugs and aphids at bay.

It wasn’t a garden of ornament, but of survival.

And yet, it stirred something in me. Standing in the heat, watching the drooping leaves and the cracked earth, I felt as though I had stepped into an ancestral memory. This was the original Inner Ink: plants not just grown, but written into daily life. Leaves as language, roots as story.

I thought of my own herb garden, the dreams I’ve scribbled in notebooks and half-planted in pots. I thought of my dill, collapsing in its final days, and how little intention I’ve brought to my planting so far. Here, though — here was intention made visible. The ancestors knew that a garden could be kitchen, pharmacy, dye house, and chapel all at once. A place where every plant had meaning.

Perhaps that’s why it felt like home.

We spend so much of our lives today chasing beauty or productivity, as though they are separate things. But in this garden, I saw a time when beauty and utility, prayer and medicine, food and symbolism grew side by side. No waste. No division. Just roots, tangled with our own.

And maybe that’s the whisper I carried away from the ruins: that our stories were always planted first in the soil, long before they were inked onto the page.

And yes, I may have lost myself a little too deeply in that thought — wandering each bed, reading every sign, tracing the names of herbs I half-recognised. The eye-rolls from my family were legendary. The kids, wilting in the heat, waiting around while I tried to decode medieval plant lore. But I couldn’t help it. Some places you don’t just see — you feel them tugging at your roots.