There are a few things you learn quickly when you marry into a family like mine. One is that my mother-in-law is kooky in the best possible way; she is a crystal healer, runs her own holistic and complementary therapy training centre, keeps tarot decks coming out of every drawer like they’ve been multiplying in the dark, and consults psychics whenever she needs help making a major life decision.

When she started talking about installing a copper pyramid in her veg bed, then, I didn’t even blink. I did, however, have a few questions – or, rather, just the one question: why?

As it turns out, the decision was entirely driven by the idea of electroculture. Sitting somewhere between ancient wisdom, modern pseudoscience, and very committed curiosity, the basic theory is that plants can benefit from atmospheric energy, and that certain structures – often copper coils or pyramid shapes inspired by the Great Pyramid of Giza – can act as passive antennas.

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Copper, being highly conductive, is believed by proponents to help “collect” or amplify this energy and channel it into the soil, supposedly improving plant vitality and growth. And, keen to put the theory to the test, my mother-in-law set to work constructing a copper pyramid to pop one of her raised beds.

It is worth pointing out that this is not a small structure. It is worth pointing out, too, that next to it sits another raised bed without a copper pyramid; just the usual mix of soil, seeds, hope, and compost. If you were trying to run a controlled experiment, you could hardly ask for a neater setup.

Now, I want to be very clear that, while I love the concept of lunar gardening, witchy herbs, and (ahem) birth month trees, the majority of my gardening decisions are driven by soil structure, sunlight, water, spacing, and my husband (who, as I have mentioned before, is an RHS-trained professional gardener). I also understand coincidence; plants are variable, seasons are unpredictable, and sometimes one bed just takes off while another lags behind for reasons that have nothing to do with copper geometry.

And yet...

Well, and yet the pyramid bed has consistently outperformed the non-pyramid bed. The vegetables are bigger, the leaves are lusher, germination has been more reliable. Even the general “vibe” of the plants (yes, I realise this is a scientifically meaningless metric, but hey, emotionally accuracy is key!) feels more enthusiastic.

Meanwhile, the neighboring bed is... fine, I guess. It is doing a perfectly respectable job. However, the vegetables it produces lack the va-va-voom of its pyramid-topped rival, and while I could try to come up with a reason for this (maybe it gets slightly less light? Maybe the soil is ever so slightly different? Maybe it really is just “the energy”?

Personally, I have been quietly working on another theory, which is absolutely not focused on whether electroculture “works” in any provable sense, but how it changes the way you pay attention to a garden.

I suspect a shiny copper pyramid is likely to make you a) tend to your plants a little more lovingly, and b) notice everything more closely – the way plants respond to structure, to placement, to small shifts in environment. It turns an ordinary raised bed into something you observe almost like a living experiment.

Gardening, at its core, already asks a kind of faith from us. We put tiny seeds into soil and trust that something will happen. In that sense, my mother-in-law’s copper pyramid doesn’t feel entirely out of place. It is just a more dramatic expression of the same impulse: to believe that unseen forces might be at work in the soil.

And whether those forces are electrical, symbolic, psychological, or simply the result of good compost and a favourable microclimate? All magic, in my opinion. A thriving garden is always a gift, no matter who sends it our way.