Aziraphale's Bucket List #71: Plant a tree
"How utterly fascinating!", said Aziraphale, waving for the waiter to bring them another round of coffee. "Two thousand years! I didn't know seeds could survive this long without rotting. What kind of plant is it?"
"A Judean date palm", explained the botanist. "They were everywhere at the time. Dates were a staple food and the trees used for shade, but they have since gone extinct. Well, not dates in general, but this particular variety."
Aziraphale smiled and nodded. He knew that of course. Shame, really. Back in the day the humans had made quite a delicious wine from it, too. Gomorra especially had been famous for it. Crowley had loved those little cocktails, hadn't he?
"Interesting. What are you going to do with them?", he asked Dr. Solowey, not having the foggiest idea of what kind of tests one might run on ancient seeds these days. As was often the case, Aziraphale's understanding of science was several decades behind the times.
Dr. Solowey frowned into her coffee.
"Actually they asked me to try to germinate them", she said.
Aziraphale's brows shot up in surprise.
"You can do that?", he blurted out.
Dr. Solowey chuckled and shook her head.
"Truth to be told: I doubt it", she told him bluntly. "I don't think it's going to work. But we will learn something, no matter how it goes. That's the beauty of science, isn't it? It's always worth a try."
"Oh, I absolutely agree with you on that", said Aziraphale excitedly. He smiled and patted her hand. "And who knows: You might just find that you have a green thumb."
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"He is over three meters [ten feet] tall, he's got a few offshoots, he has flowers, and his pollen is good," she says. "We pollinated a female with his pollen, a wild [modern] female, and yeah, he can make dates."
In 2005, Solowey, an expert in desert agriculture, germinated the ancient seed, which was recovered decades earlier from an archaeological excavation at Masada, a historic mountainside fortress. The seed had spent years in a researcher's drawer in Tel Aviv. In the years since Methuselah first sprouted, Solowey has successfully germinated a handful of other date palms from ancient seeds recovered at archaeological sites around the Dead Sea.
"I'm trying to figure out how to plant an ancient date grove," she says. To do that, she'll need to grow a female plant from an ancient seed as a mate for Methuselah. So far, at least two of the other ancient seeds that have sprouted are female. If Solowey succeeds, she notes, "we would know what kind of dates they ate in those days and what they were like. That would be
"What's that you're reading?", Crowley interrupted him, trying to sneak a glance at the screen as he set down the cup of freshly brewed tea.
Aziraphale looked up from his kindle.
"Oh nothing, my dear", he said lightly, taking the tea with a grateful smile. "Just checking in on a long time project."
The angel closed his eyes for a moment as he blew on the hot liquid, smiling to himself.
And dreamed of date cocktails.
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A/N: Article taken from here: news/2015/03/150324-ancient-methuselah-date-palm-sprout-science/ (2019-10-23; 16:35 CET)
I couldn't find anything whether or not they actually made wine from the dates (you can also make palm wine from the tree sap) in the area at the time but a) date wine is A Thing, the Egyptians did it b) no one knows where exactly Sodom and Gomorra were anyway (if they existed at all) and most importantly c) it's humans we're talking about. If it can be fermented it will be fermented.