This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

Different areas of the garden had clearly been kept for different purposes. Close to the house, there was a large, wide pot in a place of prominence, where purple-headed chives were fighting with a thick, dark mint. If it had ever been home to other herbs, they had been consumed in the war between those two plants, which now seemed to be in a stalemate.

Further from the house, but still in a part of the garden where stone tiles dominated, there were a number of raised beds that Verity imagined had been for flowers, or perhaps decoration of some other kind, though it was hard to tell what was weed and what wasn’t. There were benches on the stone tile and an area with what appeared to be a firepit, though there was no wood anywhere nearby. Most likely, Verity would have to find a guide to local plants and pull everything that could be positively identified as a weed, but given what Mizuki had said about the history of the house, it seemed possible that some of these plants originated in Kiromo, and she didn’t want to pull anything that couldn’t be replaced.

Beyond the patio area of the garden, where most of the decorative elements were, she found a fairly large patch of ground that had clearly once been a fruit and vegetable garden. The most obvious survivors were tomatoes and possibly some potatoes, along with onions that looked like they had gone feral and, aside from those, a strawberry patch that surely had killed some other plants in the course of its expansion, with runners going outside the stone edging. It was a quite large plot, large enough that Verity thought that during times of harvest it would have overflowed the house with food. She found it interesting, in a way, to look at a garden like this, one that had sat untouched for perhaps five years. To know what to do with the space, Verity had to determine what someone else had planned. There was archaeology, of a sort, to be done. It would take some careful work to see what could be salvaged and what needed to be tossed out.

Finally, beyond the garden plot, other plants surrounded the house, though these seemed in better condition, if in need of pruning and care. There were also a number of trees, some of them clearly foreign, or at least nothing like Verity had seen during her long trip to Pucklechurch or even in Dondrian.

Gardening was different in Dondrian, and not just because of the warmer climate. Verity’s home was in the city, rather than being a country estate, and they had to make do with a greenroom that jutted out from the third floor. Verity had loved the greenroom, especially in winter, when the sun came in through the glass ceiling and walls to heat the place up, and it took on a bit of swampiness without the normal airflow from outside. It was one of the only places you could get properly humid in the winter, and the smell of leaves and soil on top of that was all the better. Of course, Dondrian winters were mild, graced with snow once in a blue moon, so the texture of it was different. In Dondrian, you could garden almost year-round, though their grounds had been quite small.

This kind of garden, in the backyard of Mizuki’s large house, was altogether different. The plants weren’t in neat little pots like back in the greenroom. There were weeds everywhere, which Verity had only occasionally had to deal with in her greenroom, usually from a batch of soil that hadn’t been properly cleaned. The plants here were subject to the winds and the rains, their water not carefully administered by a small, weak waterstone. There was, perhaps, something to like in the wildness on display, but there were so many complications that came with the true outdoors that Verity couldn’t say that it was what she would have chosen.

As with most things, a huge and daunting project could be made a lot simpler by taking it in pieces. Verity focused on the large pot next to the house that held the herbs, which was the smallest element of the rambling, overgrown garden and the most like what she had known back in Dondrian. She was searching around to see if there was, perhaps, a survivor of the war between the chives and mint that could be nursed back to health when Mizuki came back from town.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“Poorly,” said Verity, giving her most cheerful smile. It felt false. “I don’t know what half these plants even are since some are surely local to Pucklechurch and some were presumably brought from Kiromo. I have no idea which is which, and I somewhat doubt that you do either.” She pointed at the big pot. “The mint and chives have taken over, and I’ll need to trim them back, but I’m not sure what you would want to go in their place.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. “You know, I kind of forgot that this was here.”

“You don’t use herbs in your cooking?” asked Verity.

“Oh, I do, of course,” said Mizuki. “But mostly I buy them. I guess it just didn’t occur to me that they’d kept growing.”