Atomic gardening

[3] One example is the resistance to verticillium wilt of the 'Todd's Mitcham'[4] cultivar of peppermint, which was produced from a breeding and test program at Brookhaven National Laboratory from the mid-1950s.

[9] The youngest member of the society was Christopher Abbey (15), a student at Eastbourne College and the son of a dentist, who received a certificate of merit for propagating several species of irradiated seeds to maturity.

[10] Howorth, in an effort to give the members of her society a broader selection, began ordering seeds from Speas in large quantities.

This was due to a combination of public opinion moving away from atomic energy and a failure on the part of the crowd-sourced Society to produce noteworthy results.

[10] In spite of this, large-scale gamma gardens remained in use, and a number of commercial plant varieties were developed and released by laboratories and private companies alike.

[11] Gamma gardens were typically five acres (two hectares) in size, and were arranged in a circular pattern with a retractable radiation source in the middle.

Radioactive bombardment would take place for around twenty hours, after which scientists wearing protective equipment would enter the garden and assess the results.