Plant Sprouting in Asphalt Leads to High-Minded Discussion

By HOPE REEVES

Sometimes, when you walk your dog, and your dog is a hound dog who moves very slowly and insists on sniffing every little thing, you notice things that might otherwise escape your attention. Such was the case on Thursday as Bart Quillen ambled along Greene Avenue in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

“I looked down at what Honey was so intently smelling and, oh my goodness, what a surprise!” said Mr. Quillen, 45. “I thought, ‘Well, it's not called ‘weed' for nothing.”

Indeed, Honey had her snout firmly embedded in a clump of urban greenery erupting from a crack in the sidewalk that Mr. Quillen immediately identified as a marijuana plant.

City Room sent a photo of it to Marielle Anzelone, a former staff botanist for the city's parks department and a City Room contributor. “It certainly looks like it,” she wrote back, though she stopped short of giving a positive identification. “What I do know is that the plant is an herbaceous annual with opposite, palmately divided leaves of five to seven leaflets that are coarsely toothed.”

Ms. Anzelone seemed surprised by the upstart's general heartiness, noting that the “habitat is pretty poor (asphalt, marginal exotic weeds).” But this exotic weed turns up often enough, as it did in 2010 in Ditmas Park. (Back in the 1950s, acres of the stuff flourished in the borough's vacant lots.)

Ms. Anzelone added, “You could imagine someone picking the seeds out of a stash and dropping them, resulting in this.”

That's just what Sherman Nelson surmised as he stared down at the 15-inch-high plant on Friday. “They're always passing by here wrapping it up,” said Mr. Nelson, 65, a superintendent at a nearby building. He differed, however, on his assessment of the plant's environment, saying, “This is very rich soil, you know.”

A little while later, Mr. Quillen and Honey walked by o nly to notice another man admiring the industrious green sprout.

“I said, ‘It's a handsome plant,'” Mr. Quillen recalled. “He said, ‘Yes it is. And I'm going to take it right now.'”

The man declared that he was going to give it a “nice home” and “put it in a very pretty pot, too.” Then he went to fetch a trowel.