I started with the books. The ones Brian never threw out, even when I’d stacked them two-deep in the shed and swore half were duplicates. Wild Plants of Western Ireland. Coastal Flora of Europe. A dog-eared Collins Guide that had once survived a week in the footwell of the Peugeot.
None of them had it.
The one from the garden near Villajoyosa—the plant with the bruised-purple centre, the unapologetic sprawl, the way it looked like it belonged even though it didn’t match anything else around it.
I made tea. Forgot the tea. Made more. Max sighed dramatically every time I shifted on the bench.
By the third day, I’d moved on to the internet, which is where it always gets dangerous. Forums full of people who either know everything or nothing and say both with equal confidence. A man from Kent said it was Echium candicans. A woman in Tarragona said it might be a hybrid, something from seed drift, “but hard to tell without a close-up of the pistil.” I wasn’t sure I was ready for pistils at 9 a.m.
I clicked a link someone shared and found myself on a blog called Iberian Outliers.
Sparse. Academic. Unsentimental.
Photos of outcroppings, roadside weeds, forgotten borderlands full of colour. And there it was. My plant. No name beneath it, just a line:
“Found west of Orxeta, possibly introduced by wind or birds. Non-native. Still figuring it out.”
I scrolled to the byline.
C. Kilpatrick.
And I stopped.
Because once, years ago, I wrote a reference letter for a Clare Kilpatrick.
Quiet girl. Smelled like marker pens and smoked clove cigarettes when she thought no one was watching. Obsessed with fern spores and hedgerow succession patterns.
She’d sat in my garden in Connemara, long before we had pigs, before Brian retired. Took notes while I showed her the wild cranesbill growing through the chicken wire. Asked real questions. Didn’t nod along like some do.
I read the whole blog. Every entry.
Max sulked in the hallway. I forgot his walk.
Clare had been everywhere. Portugal. Galicia. Sardinia. She wasn’t loud about it. No personal photos. No “my journey” nonsense. Just plants, weather, the odd throwaway line about border crossings or missed trains.
Something about it all made my chest tighten. Not with jealousy. Not quite.
It was the fact that she’d stuck with it.
That while I’d been holed up in a Spanish villa, planting foxgloves into unsuitable clay and watching old box sets on my laptop, she’d been out there—watching things grow in the wild, chasing a plant no one had bothered naming yet.
It made me feel something I hadn’t felt in a while.
Restless.
That afternoon I dug up the bluebells. All of them.
They were scorched anyway. Never took to the shade by the gate. Brian always said it was the wrong spot.
He wasn’t wrong.
Max barked once and then went to sit under the lemon tree. I filled two tubs with soil and started sorting the seeds I still had. I found the last of the Sea Campion Niamh had sent. Might be too late in the season. Might not. Doesn’t matter. I needed to try something.
I haven’t emailed Clare. Not yet.
But I bookmarked the page.
And I printed the photo of the plant. It’s pinned above the sink now, next to the list of things I keep forgetting to buy.
Toothpaste. Olive oil. Courage.