Somebody with a sense of humour and a few marijuana plants to spare engaged in some guerrilla landscaping on Admirals Road over the weekend.
This morning, crews working on the Saanich portion of Admirals found 26 small, neatly planted marijuana stalks in the earth of a new sidewalk boulevard, between Inlet and Rockwell roads.
Saanich parks manager Rae Roer said the pot plants were in paper bags, spaced about one metre apart. Saanich police did some reverse landscaping and have since seized the plants.
"It is very odd," Roer said. "I never seen or heard of anything like this before ... I guess it's someone wanting to make a statement."
Police aren't sure when the pot was planted, although one reader told the News via Facebook he noticed them at 10 a.m. Sunday.
Saanich police Sgt. Steve Eassie said an officer confirmed the plants were indeed immature marijuana plants, between 12 and 16 inches high. If grown to maturity and sold at the gram level, each plant could have fetched about $900. It wasn't clear if any stalks had been poached by the public between the weekend and Monday.
"The environmental conditions right now are ideal to grow (marijuana), although I certainly haven't seen it along a public roadway, not in my experience," Eassie said.
He said someone could have planted the pot as a joke, perhaps to protest the closing of Admirals Road for roadwork and bridgework, or as a political message. Whatever the reason, the landscaper risked arrest and charges.
That portion of the sidewalk has utilities below and will have grass planted in the boulevard – the legal kind.
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