Sowed tulips, reaped wacky backy
It’s said that you reap what you sow. If that’s the case, someone close to authority in one of Russia’s main cities has got some explaining to do.
Marijuana has taken root in a flowerbed right under the windows of the local authorities’ office in the city of Ekaterinburg in the Russian Urals. Almost fifty bushes of the plant have grown in the flowerbed alongside tulips in front of the governor’s residence, LifeNews tabloid reported. Locals noticed the strange grass, but could not believe their eyes.“In the 21st century, I think everyone knows what is this. Russian national product – hemp,” NTV television quotes Dmitry Spertor. He took a photo of the plant’s leaves and compared them to the pictures on the internet.“I photographed the leaves, came home, doubting the whole time, of course. Then I opened Wikipedia, compared the leaves and saw that there really is such a variety. I was 100 per cent sure that I was not wrong,” Dmitry says.Dmitry counted about fifty bushes of grass in the tulip flowerbed and called the police. Though police officers arrived at the scene, they realized that they were not knowledgeable about narcotic grass, and did not even know what it was supposed to look like. Botanists who came to inspect the area did not need an examination to recognize typical hemp at first sight. They warned that if were not destroyed as soon as possible, in a month there would be a genuine marijuana plantation in a month.“It will bloom in the second part of the summer. The plant will be about a meter or two high, so quite big and strong,” explained Evgeny Fliagin, a botanist from Ekaterinburg.Operations to destroy drug plantations are often conducted in the Urals, but usually it is wild grass in the countryside. It is the first time drug control officers have found such a large amount of marijuana in flowerbeds, so they started an investigation – was this is an accident or deliberate?Local officials do not exclude the most incredible version of the penetration of pot in the flowerbed in Ekaterinburg. They suggest the seed of weed could have come with tulips from Holland."There is a possibility that the average bird ate a seed and then it just got in our flower garden in the center of the city," says Tamara Blagodatkova, a local official.Now all communal services have been ordered to weed all the flowerbeds in the city in order to prevent the spread of a drug plant.“Screening is being conducted. As for the plantations, community services assured that in the near future they will be destroyed at what is called the root," Valery Gorelikh police spokesperson said.There are warnings that the process will take more than a month. As soon as communal services pull out one sprout, a new one is growing. Meanwhile locals are hurrying to take photos with the drug plant.
