It’s not A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and it’s not a mighty oak standing alone at the edge of a farm field. But Uptown Westerville has its own stubborn little volunteers — from petunias that escape the city’s hanging baskets and take root between sidewalk bricks to a Roma tomato plant now growing beside Megan Lee’s design studio.
Building owner Luke Ernst almost cut down the fruiting volunteer while trimming weeds in the narrow space between Megan Lee Design and the parking lot next to My Cousin’s Cottage on East College. Then he took a closer look.
What had blended in with the weeds was a tomato plant, sprawled on its side and carrying a surprisingly large crop of green fruit.
Ernst checked with Lee, whose design studio occupies the building, before removing the plant. She admitted she hadn’t noticed it — or the tomatoes weighing down its branches. Once she did, the tomato’s future was secure.
Lee quickly put some of her studio materials to another use, tying the plant with transparent ribbon to lift it off the ground. It now stands upright along the building while she waits for the green tomatoes to ripen.
Exactly how a Roma tomato plant came to grow there remains a mystery.
Ernst and Lee suspect a seed may have found its way from a nearby dumpster used by Los Altos Mexican restaurant. Somehow, it landed in just enough soil along the edge of the parking lot to germinate and grow.
Its Uptown neighbors have done something similar.
Volunteer petunias regularly appear beneath the city’s hanging flower baskets, their seeds finding cracks between sidewalk bricks and other tiny patches of soil. The tomato appears to be a larger and more productive member of the same unofficial Uptown garden.
Its fruit may eventually travel only a short distance.
Josh, the chef at nearby Asterisk, learned about the plant and told Lee it would be interesting to use some of the ripe tomatoes in a small menu item. The idea would fit with the restaurant’s existing practice: Asterisk grows herbs in pots behind the building.
The plant also quickly produced another kind of local crop. Lee, a longtime Westerville designer whose T-shirts are among the popular offerings in Uptown, turned the renegade tomato into a new design within hours of its discovery.
The shirt features the unexpected tomato plant and a tagline that sums up its journey from nearly being trimmed as a weed to becoming part of the Uptown landscape.
“Find joy in the unexpected.”
Only What’s Safe Remains
The bank is gone, but the vault apparently didn’t get the memo.
Nearly everything that once made up the former PNC Bank on Sunbury Road at Sunbury Plaza has been reduced to rubble, except for the hulking concrete vault still standing stubbornly at the edge of the demolition site. Now, with the building gone and speculation swirling, rumors suggest a car wash, possibly Moo Moo Express Car Wash, could be headed for the property.
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