It is a verbascum hybrid called ‘Wedding Candles’ that we grew from seed last year. Verbascums are also known as mulleins. That’s right, this genus of plants includes common mullein ...

And this is relatively common among plants that they can hybridize in this way. But unbeknownst to Beal, he packed a hybrid Verbascum seed into this bottle over 140 years ago, waiting for us to ...

Nearly half the Verbascum seeds from 2000’s bottle bloomed, even though they’d been in stasis underground for over a century. Today, farmers don’t really need the kind of help with weeds ...

It's getting cold out: Global warming is still making weather weird Most seeds lost viability within the first 60 years of the experiment, but others like Verbascum blattaria — more commonly kno ...

thapsus seed when he was filling the bottles. Verbascum seeds are one of the few species that are still able to germinate. The rest stopped germinating after a few decades. The team hopes that it ...

"The molecular genetics work confirmed the phenotypes we saw, which is that the plants were Verbascum blattaria, or moth mullein, and one hybrid of Verbascum blattaria and Verbascum thapsus ...

And this means these seeds are really, really happy. They don't feel like they're dead or have been in storage at all. That's the normal amount of time it takes for a verbascum seed to germinate.

Apparently Dr. Beal had intended to preserve a different species, Verbascum thapsus. That one was present in the first eight bottles and fared less well, with few of its seeds growing after only ...

Fortunately, these sterile hybrids can be rooted from cuttings, and the biennial species, if happy, self-seed. Quite a few Verbascum are worth growing for foliage alone, including V. bombyciferum ...