Armed with shovels, gloves and headlights, the team followed their map to the excavation site. The vibe was “very pirated,” Dr. Weber said. Dr. Telewski began digging a neat, square hole.
But as they sculpted deeper and wider, no bottles were found. “The birds were starting to chirp,” Dr. Weber said, and the sun threatened to throw off their lids. “Morale was low.”
When Dr. Beal first buried the seed bottles, he planned to bury them every 5 years, and the experiment would last a century. But as time went on, those in charge extended the range of excavations to 10 years, then to 20. Two were slightly delayed: 1919 was moved in the spring of 1920 – which Dr. Telewski suspects may have been related. with the 1918 flu; and 2020 have been moved this year due to Covid-19 campus shutdowns.
To avoid losing the thread over these decades, a kind of ministry of seed keepers has developed in the state of Michigan, with each generation of botanists passing the torch to younger colleagues.
Dr. Telewski – a professor of plant biology at the university and the seventh in charge of the experiment – dug up the first bottle of seeds in 2000 with his predecessor, Jan Zeevaart, who died in 2009. A few years ago, laughing at his own mortality, he gave a copy of the map to David Lowry, an associate professor of plant biology, who had expressed an interest in joining.
Only a few months later, Dr. Telewski suffered a stroke. Although he has recovered since then, “he has shown me how delicate it is to teach these things, keeping them a secret,” said Dr. Lowry. Soon after, Dr. Telewski invited Dr. Weber, who is an assistant professor at the university, and Dr. Brudvig to get involved as well.
Over the years, Dr. Beal’s purely practical decisions have developed a patina of mysticism. Dr. Beal excavated each new bottle under the roof of darkness to not be dramatic, but simply to protect the other bottled seeds from sunlight, which could cause them to germinate ahead of their time, Dr. Telewski said. (The team uses green light bulbs in the headlights for the same reason.)