The Old and the New!

Just 300 feet down the slope from our home is a very rocky lot.  It has lots of dirt, lots of thorn bushes and lots of little things that people have been losing for thousands of years.  I can't imagine anyone saying.. oh, this beautiful glass jar is broken, I'll just toss it out the window and let someone find bits of it one day... but it does seem to work that way.  Otherwise, how to explain all the bits of pottery and Roman glass just laying around everywhere? (OK, so the ancient coin I found today probably fell out of someone's pocket...)

So, what you see here is a very young seedling that has sprouted in a piece of Roman glass.  The technique for making this kind of piece involves folding over the lip to make a nice, soft and even rim.  It usually traps air all along the edge, under the rim.  What happened here?

After a very long time - perhaps 2 thousand years - a little seed got caught against one edge of the glass.  When it sprouted after our recent rain storms, the root grew into the little tunnel of trapped air, which had filled with dirt.  When I spied the chunk of Roman glass and picked it up, the seedling came with it.  In the photo you can't really see that the dirt is INSIDE the glass, not on the outside, unless you look carefully at the bottom left of the chunk, where the roots are hanging out. 

This is a very cool find - and I've put it on wet cotton in my window, until I find an appropriate way to pot it. I'm wondering if the growing root will eventually crack the rim open, or if the little thorn bush will be a dwarf, since its root growth will be severely limited.