Talk:Watt 9644 (1888)
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Evidentiary scope
Watt's label gives the locality as On the descent to Manglaur from Bathad, at 6,500 feet, on 1 October 1888. Beneath it his field note reads A custom in this & in many other localities only the female plants are allowed to grow. Apparently the males are after fecundation of the female removed from the fields or broken down & left in the fields to rot. The note describes a practice in the fields of the locality; the label does not say that the mounted plant was taken from one of those fields. It gives no village-level collection point, no local variety name and no use. Drug-type cannabis from different regions began to be cross-bred, and its seed carried into old growing areas, in the 1970s (McPartland and Small 2020, pp. 84–85), so a hybrid origin is not considered for a sheet gathered in 1888. The accession is classified Landrace, by inference from the field note. The sheet does not show what became of the crop or whether its seed survives, and no conservation priority is assigned.
Georeferencing
The label names a route rather than a collection point. Its 6,500-foot altitude places the gathering somewhere on that descent, but it does not say how far Watt had travelled from Bathad. The coordinate is Bathad in OpenStreetMap (node 5123995342), 31.60, 77.48, the named upper end of the descent; Bathad stands at about 2,037 m and the label's 6,500 feet is 1,981 m. It marks where the descent begins, not where Watt was standing, because the label does not say how far along it he had travelled.
Entered under the rule that georeferences a historical accession to the place its label names, at two decimal places, with the mapped object named above. The point locates this sheet to about 10 km, and the article's prose is unchanged. Éloise 06:11, 18 September 2026 (+07)
Editorial treatment
Watt says the removal followed fertilisation, so the note does not establish seedless cultivation or explain why the plants were managed this way. It also does not identify who followed the practice.
An earlier revision of the article called the note direct evidence that growers distinguished the sexes and removed male plants from cultivated fields. Watt qualifies his account of the removal with Apparently, so the article quotes the note without that reading.
These notes were moved from the accession article during the article-Talk cleanup of 16 September 2026. Source citations remain in the article. Éloise 11:09, 16 September 2026 (+07)
Growing area (2026-09-29)
The accession's growing area is Tirthan Valley. The label's locality, "On the descent to Manglaur from Bathad", is a stage of the old road to Rampur, which the 1897 gazetteer says "ascends the Tirthan valley"; it places Bathad "in the valley of a tributary of the Tirthan" (Diack, p. 108). The 1917 gazetteer puts the Bathad rest-house at 6,000 feet (p. 136), against the label's 6,500 feet.