Seeds. (Flickr: jby)
There are a couple of neat racks on my desk containing rows of plastic tubes, each tube with a drift of tiny, kidney-bean-shaped seeds at the bottom. These are seeds of Medicago truncatula, barrel medick. When I tell people about this plant I’m currently studying, I usually describe it as an unremarkable wildflower native to the Mediterranean. Or I note that it’s a close-ish relative of alfalfa (Medicago sativa).
Medicago truncatula does not have an especially grand heritage. It grows in dry, sunny places throughout the dry, sunny Mediterranean region, forming low tangles of trifoliate leaves and small yellow flowers that eventually ripen into tough, spiky, vaguely barrel-shaped fruits full of those tiny seeds. Some of the seeds on my desk are descended from plants that grew in places like the Temple of Apollo at Curium, Cyprus; but most are from less distinguished locales. In his 2011 monograph on the genus Medicago, Ernest Small quotes a description of M. truncatula‘s habitat as “sandy fields, wet grasslands, wet meadows, strongly overgrazed and degraded garrique, coniferous forests, grasslands, fallow fields, olive groves, and as a weed in cereal and crops and waste places.”
