It’s fourth period. As I pack up my bag, the bell rings signaling the end of the day. Exiting the building through Stairwell A, something strange catches my eye: a random plant growing right outside the doors parallel to the stairwell. A closer look revealed that this green mystery was no more than a tomato plant—and one that was producing tomatoes!
Going home, a multitude of questions were swirling in my head. How did it get there? Who is taking care of it? Who staked it up? Does anyone else know about it? And how is it able to grow in the concrete?
The next day at school, I was still plagued with thoughts about the plant. But who would I ask these questions to? What about Donna Dunn? She’s an English teacher, but she’s also a brilliant gardener. I had to get her on the case.
Anyone who’s been in Dunn’s room is innately aware of her plant appreciation. I learned that not only has she propagated most of her plants in her room, but her favorites are her begonias, which are a decade old, and the lemon tree she grew from a mere seed. She was aware of the plant, just not its origin.
“I’ve seen it. No idea how it got there,” Dunn said. “This is just the amazing thing about where they will choose to grow… Tomatoes are persnickety plants, so [it’s] fascinating that it survived right there.”
Fascinating though this was, I still didn’t have my answer. But as I was leaving Dunn’s room, she called out to me, saying that I should go talk to Melissa Boswell, as she might know more. Following her advice, I made my way to Boswell, and I was happily surprised when I found out more than I thought I would. As I walked up to Boswell and Annette Jenkins, I was promptly greeted with a conversation about the tomato plant. Boswell, the online classes coordinator and teacher, was very happy to help me in my endeavors with this plant.
“I started to notice it over the summer,” Boswell said. “And I was like, no, I’m going to wait to see what happens, and then we came back and it was a little bigger.”
Originally, though, Soaring Eagles teacher Teresa Whitaker and substitute teacher, Ms. Beauchamp, were the first ones to notice the plant in June of last school year. At the time , it was itty bitty, only about a couple of inches tall, as it had just started to grow. When the teachers returned in August for the school year, they started taking turns watering it. Now, at the beginning of November, it stands tall, having around twenty tomatoes growing on it.
Unfortunately, with the first frosty night of winter, the plant was frostbitten and starting to die. With the advice from Jenkins and Davis, Boswell and I pulled the bundles of tomatoes off the vine for us to enjoy.
Though the mystery still remains of how it got there, my questions have been answered at last. It wasn’t some wild goose chase that I thought it would be; instead, it was a quiet, steady mystery that fed into a larger community of people coming together and taking care of things that they value.
