HORTUS LUCIAE
The Third Marker’s Garden · Private Residence / Pre-Rift Site · Old Fields District, Vetus Portus
"A pre-Rift boundary marker currently supporting a climbing vine in a private garden is the physical anchor of a title claim that has been held in abeyance for twenty-three years. The owner has twice asked the Aquila firm about the post’s significance. Both times she has been told it is a boundary marker of no current legal significance. The distinction between historical and current significance is the most carefully maintained hairline in the firm’s practice."
Lucia Fossor Agri’s garden on the eastern residential edge of the Old Fields District contains, functioning as a support post for a climbing vine, a pre-Rift boundary marker that is the physical anchor of a title claim the Aquila firm has held in abeyance for twenty-three years. The marker is one of three surviving pre-Rift boundary posts in original positions; the others are on active farming land. This one is in a private residential garden, unknown to its owner’s owner in its full significance, having been used as a garden post for twelve years.
In 1200 A.P. Lucia, forty-four, is planning a garden renovation whose scope includes removing the old stone post that has been supporting her vine. A builder is scheduled to arrive in two weeks. The Aquila firm does not know about the renovation. Decimus’s six-monthly check of the marker’s position is overdue — the last check was eight months ago, before Lucia began the renovation plans. The marker’s removal would not destroy the title claim’s legal basis, but it would require the Aquila firm to activate a survey before the claim could be used, which would require informing the farming families of the survey, which would prompt Publia Agri Antiqua to ask questions the firm would prefer not to answer yet.
Design
A standard residential garden on the eastern edge of the Old Fields District’s residential streets: a walled plot approximately twelve metres by eight, with a vegetable section at the north end, the vine-covered post at the south-east corner, and the access to the second-century cellar that Lucia uses for vegetable storage and that predates the house above it. The post is a worn limestone column approximately half a metre tall, its surface weathered to near-illegibility, a pale ring visible around its base where the vine has kept the surface drier than the surrounding ground. No feature of the garden distinguishes it as a pre-Rift site. The post looks like an old garden post.
Denizens
Lucia Fossor Agri , forty-four. Owns the garden, the house, the vine, and the post she plans to remove in two weeks. Has asked the Aquila firm twice about the post’s significance; has been told twice it is of no current legal significance. Is not suspicious of this answer because she has no reason to be. Is planning a renovation because the vine has outgrown its current support and she wants a proper trellis. The renovation will also address the cellar access, which has become awkward since the vine took over the corner. She is a farming family descendant whose family’s connection to the pre-town field boundaries is the oldest documented private land relationship in the province, though she knows this only in the general sense of knowing her family has been here a long time.
Access
Private residential property.
The garden is accessible from the residential street; the cellar from the garden.
No institutional access designation.
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