Bonded Thyme

Description

A small pressed mat of creeping thyme: about a dozen wiry, woody, prostrate stems up to 12 cm long, reddish-brown, with paired ovate leaves 4–6 mm long dried to a dusty grey-green. A few stem tips carry shrunken rounded flower heads faded to pale mauve and buff, and a tangle of fine roots at one end still holds crumbs of dark soil.

Observations

In the hands of whoever last signed for it, the plant weighs what it should: 31 g with its mug and soil. For anyone else it cannot be lifted, slid or tipped. A 600 kg platform scale reads overload, and a forklift rated for 2,500 kg lifts its own rear wheels instead. A sprig changes hands only when the signatory hands it over.

The file

The customs officer’s field diary, kept at the Conservatory’s request, with the registrar’s note appended.

14 September 2023 — Röszke, lane 4

07:40. Hatchback on Serbian plates, one occupant: Kovács Ilona, born 1949, of Horgoš, travelling to her daughter in Szeged. Nothing declared. In the passenger footwell, an enamel mug, white with a chipped blue rim, holding a clump of thyme in its own soil.

Plants from a third country need a phytosanitary certificate. She had none. I explained. She did not argue, though they usually do. She signed the waiver in favour of the state and I signed the seizure record as receiving officer, 07:58. She asked me to keep it out of the sun. Then, getting back into the car: Mind you sign properly. I had already signed.

08:15. Bakó went to take it to the seized-goods store and could not lift it. He thought it had been glued down. I picked it up and it weighed almost nothing. I handed it to him. It left my hand and went straight down through his, onto the bench, upright, without a sound. Since then it has moved only when I moved it.

15 September – 3 November 2023 — The bench

Canteen scale, mug set down by me: 31 g, mug and soil included. Bakó could not move it onto the scale at all. The 600 kg platform scale in the cargo hall, mug placed by me, then nudged by Halász: OL. The forklift (rated 2,500 kg) lifted its own rear wheels off the floor.

Halász, the duty manager, phoned the regional directorate. Their lawyer came down on the 21st, tried it himself, and said that the Hungarian state was the owner, that nobody disputed this, and that the state does not as a rule lift things. He wrote except the thyme in the margin of his own note, then crossed it out.

I water it Mondays and Thursdays. When lane 4 is cleaned I lift it and hold it until they finish. I was on leave 9–13 October; the cleaners mopped round it.

Halász wrote to the Conservatory on the 25th. They replied the next morning with a form, CR-7, and one condition: transfer is signed at their receiving desk with the object present. On 2 November the directorate released it for scientific purposes and named me to carry out delivery, being the only person able to do so.

6–7 November 2023 — In transit

The Conservatory’s courier, Mr Hensley, arrived at 05:30 with a car. I put the mug on the rear seat. The back of the car settled on its springs as if a heavy man had got in, and then the car would not go. He stalled it twice.

We left at 06:10 with the mug on my knees and my hands round it. Hensley drove; I did not sleep. At every fuel stop I had to get out with it. At the roadside hotel it stood on the bedside table overnight with no trouble at all. Standing still has never been the difficulty.

At the last frontier the officer asked what I was carrying and who owned it. I said a plant, and that it was complicated. He asked me to lift it. I lifted it. He waved us through. I would have done the same.

8 November 2023 — Receiving desk

Registrar: Ms Eleanor Marsh. Before signing she asked for a sprig for the laboratory. I pinched one off. The technician could not take it from my palm, so I dropped it into her tube myself.

CR-7 signed by me at 14:22, countersigned by Marsh at 14:23. I slid the mug across the desk to her. Then I thought I would pick it up once more and look at it properly in the light, and I could not. Marsh lifted it with one hand and put it on her scale. 31 g.

Hensley drove me to the station. My hands felt empty for some time. I note this only because I was asked to note everything.

Registrar’s note, appended

The plant declined after its Horgoš soil was removed under our own quarantine rule. I pressed it at my desk on 20 November 2023. The two samples, the sprig taken before signature and tissue taken after, are compared on the index card. No one else on the staff can lift the sheet. I can, and so far only I.

In March 2024 Mrs Kovács’s daughter wrote to ask whether the thyme had arrived safely. She enclosed a photocopy of a note in her grandmother’s hand, dated 1971: Ezt a kakukkfüvet Ilonának adom. I give this thyme to Ilona. It is filed with the sheet.

I retire in 2031. A deed is being drafted.

Genetic analysis

Barcoding of the trnL–F spacer places it in Thymus with one exception: a 9 bp tandem repeat found in no reference thyme. The sprig taken before the custody record was signed carries two copies of the repeat; tissue taken after carries three — one for each name on the record.

Cultivation

Not attempted. The Conservatory does not propagate specimens whose ownership is in question, and this one’s always is. The pressed sheet is kept flat on the registrar’s own shelf, which has been reinforced.

Effects

On its signatory, none beyond the obvious. On everyone else, a mild embarrassment: visitors who try to lift the sheet tend to try again, harder, and then apologise to it.