Katharine Stewart’s Highland Haven: A Garden Through Time

May 11, 1923

On this day, a schoolyard garden outside of Lochness reported a most vexing update, one that would resonate with gardeners for generations to come.

The entry, unearthed by the property's modern-day custodian, Katharine Stewart, reads thus:

As sheep are constantly breaking into the garden work has been stopped till the walls are rendered sheep-proof.

This delightful morsel of horticultural history was shared in Stewart's enchanting month-by-month garden book, A Garden in the Hills (2006). Upon reflection of this ovine intrusion, Stewart penned:

I know exactly what he meant. More than sixty years later, the sheep, the more agile variety, are still sometimes managing to leap over the wall, where the superimposed netting has given way.

That can mean goodbye to all the summer lettuce and the winter greens, not to mention the precious flowering plants and all the work that went into producing them.

The quaint school in the Scottish highlands shuttered its doors in 1958, but its garden's legacy persevered.

A few years hence, Katharine and her husband, Sam, acquired the property known as the croft at Abriachan near Loch Ness. It was there that Katharine's literary pursuits blossomed alongside her garden.

Recalling her initial forays into the croft's verdant realm, Stewart wrote with the enthusiasm of a true gardener:

When we arrived, wild raspberries, willowherb, and sweet cicely had largely taken over.

To bees and butterflies and to many kinds of birds, this was paradise!

For us, it held all the thrill of uncharted territory.

Every day a fresh discovery was made.

Even now, I come on surprises each summer.

One can almost hear the rustling of leaves and the buzzing of bees as she describes the scene. But the garden, dear readers, held more than just botanical treasures. Stewart continues:

Digging [has] revealed many other interesting things-worn-out toys, pieces of pottery, a pile of school slates from a dump against the top wall, evidently discarded when jotters came in-and, most interesting of all, several 'scrapers' dating from prehistoric times.

What a thrill it must have been to unearth such historical artifacts! One can scarcely imagine the excitement of each discovery.

Stewart's prose then takes a turn towards the philosophical, inviting us to ponder the generations that came before:

Meanwhile, I often imagine my predecessors here looking on the same outline of hills, the same scoop of the burn in the hollow, listening to the same sounds of lark and owl, the bark of deer, and many more long gone-the howl of wolf, maybe the growl of bear.

The heather would have been their late summer delight, making drinks of tea or ale, thatching for their roofs, and kindling for their fires.

Can you envision it, dear gardeners?

The timeless beauty of the Scottish highlands, unchanged yet ever-changing through the centuries?

In a moment of introspection, Stewart muses:

Sometimes envy them the simplicity of their lives, though the hardships must have been great.

They didn't have a Christmas to celebrate, but they knew all about the winter solstice, and they must have been happy to see the bright berries on the holly, as we do today.

Indeed, the cyclical nature of gardening connects us to our ancestors in ways both profound and mundane.

Katharine Stewart, a woman of many talents, went on to become a teacher and then her town's postmistress in her later years. She tended her earthly garden until 2013, when she departed this mortal coil, leaving behind a legacy as vibrant as the flora she so lovingly cultivated.

Her daughter, Hilda, survives her, no doubt carrying forward the green-thumbed wisdom of generations past.

And so, dear readers, as we tend to our own gardens, let us remember the timeless struggles and joys of those who came before us.

May we find solace in the knowledge that, whether fending off sheep or coaxing reluctant seeds to sprout, we are part of an unbroken chain of stewards of the earth.