‘X’ may mark the spot on a map of what is now Michigan State University campus, though whether you’d consider what you dug up there to be buried treasure very much depends on your scientific outlook.
Back in 1879 American botanist Dr William James Beal, who had already made a name for himself in the development of hybrid corn, planted a very different type of crop: 20 narrow-necked glass bottles, each filled with a carefully prepared mixture of sand and seeds. Every five years after to begin with and now at 20 year intervals, researchers unearth one of the bottles and examine its contents in what has become one of the longest-running experiments in botany.
Why exactly? Dr Beal explained it as “learning something more in regard to the length of time seeds of our most common plants would remain dormant in the soil and yet germinate when exposed to favourable conditions.” In layman’s terms: “how many times do I have to pull up these damn weeds before they stop returning?” Amazingly, in the case of Verbascum blattaria (commonly known as moth mullein), the jury is still out. A full 120 years after Beal began his botanical experiment, the contents of the latest bottle to be unearthed once again contained viable moth mullein seeds. Turns out weeds aren’t that weedy after all!
