In the fall of 1879, Dr. William James Beal walked to a secret spot on Michigan State University’s campus and planted a strange crop: 20 narrow-necked glass bottles, each filled with a mixture of moist sand and seeds. Each vessel was “left uncorked and placed with the mouth slanting downward so that water could not accumulate about the seeds,” Beal wrote. “These bottles were buried on a sandy knoll in a row running east and west.”

In the spring of 2000, under cover of night, current WJ Beal Botanical Garden curator Dr. Frank Telewski and his colleague Dr. Jan Zeevaart crept out to the same secret knoll and dug up the sixth-to-last seed bottle—completing the latest act in what has become the world’s longest continually monitored scientific study.

When he buried those bottles 137 years ago, Dr. Beal didn’t aim to start the As the World Turns of garden experiments. As a botanist at an agricultural school, he was just trying to find a rigorous answer to a question that has dogged farmers for millennia: how many times do you have to pull up weeds before they stop growing back? “Back then, [farmers] didn’t have herbicides,” and weeding was the most tedious part of the job, explains Telewski. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘that’s a long row to hoe?’ That’s where that came from.”

Dr. William James Beal, father of the longest-running experiment in history. (Image: Internet

They may be tiny, but seeds are notoriously tough. Without water or sunlight to spur them into action, they can lie dormant for a very long time—in 2005, Israeli researchers grew a healthy date palm out of a 2,000-year-old seed (that tree, nicknamed Methuselah, recently became a dad). Hoping to figure out exactly how many years local species could hang on in neutral conditions, Beal filled 20 bottles with 50 seeds each of 23 different plant types. The bottles are unearthed one at a time, and the seeds are planted.

Fifteen bottles in, the clear winner is Verbascum blattaria, or moth mullein, a splay-flowered weed common throughout the United States. Verbascum has popped up consistently in every bottle, and “of the 50 seeds of that particular plant, 23 of them germinated” in 2000, says Telewski, a “phenomenal” result. Distant second place goes to Malva rotundifolia, a round-leafed mallow nicknamed “cheeses” after its wedgelike seeds. Only one of those seeds sprouted in 2000.

Dr. Telewski in 2001, among some thriving century-old moth mullein. (Photo: Frank Telewski)

As for the other 21 species, none showed even a tendril. While this might have pleased the farmers who inspired the study, it’s a little sadder for those who are now watching it most closely. These days, farmers have a whole arsenal of anti-weed tools, and Beal’s biggest devotees are conservationists—those who hope the study’s results will help them better understand the bottled seeds’ wilder counterparts. “Many species of plants that are locally extinct may actually still be viable in the soils of those particular environments that have been disturbed,” Telewski explains. Stir them from their slumber, and these Lazarus plants could restart a whole population.

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