365 Urban Species. #309: Tomato

[urbpan]

Urban species #309: Tomato Lycopersicon esculentum
Photo by urbpan. Location: River Road, Brookline.

This plant's location--behind a business, in the parking area--suggests to me that it grew from discarded food. A slice of tomato picked out of a sandwich and tossed into the bushes seems to have grown into a plant. It's flowering, and so may provide some late-flying bees with some nourishment. However, the chances that it will produce fruit that will survive to allow the plant to reproduce are slim. New England temperatures will undoubtedly plummet some time before tomatoes ripen on this plant.

Tomato, like all members of Solanaceae, the nightshade family, is native to the New World (probably, in the tomato's case, the western coast of South America). It was introduced to North America through a circuitous route, by way of Europe. It was considered a poisonous ornamental by many Europeans, diffusion of knowledge being rather imperfect at the time. Like other nightshades, including potato, the green parts of the plant are toxic. It isn't unheard of for tomato to grow wild as a weed; this individual was the second that I've encountered, the first was on a landfill heap. The plant is a bit too fragile to be a common urban weed in Northern climes, where it dies back completely, but in warmer places tomato is a perennial, and may survive for years in waste areas.





Exactly two weeks later, I took this picture:

Comments

[phlogiston-5.livejournal.com]

Mmm tomatoes! Another one I've seen in a lot of waste places are pumpkins/squash. People throw their old gourds or pumpkins away somewhere and then the next year you get humungous vines.

[martianmoons.livejournal.com]

I have noticed that too, with Halloween pumpkins I have thrown onto the back yard compost pile. In the spring, there is this beautiful vine that is growing. It is awesome! :)

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I have a constantly-renewing supply of volunteer tomatoes in my yard. They rarely ripen more than one or two tomatoes before they get too annoying to live. I've never had a tomato plant die of cold, here, but we don't always get a killing frost every year. My impression is that the determinate tomatoes are annuals or shorter-lived, anyway, than indeterminate ones. Our limiting factor is getting enough heat in the space of our cool summers.

[by-steph.livejournal.com]

As for the toxicity thing, I read recently that there something legitimate behind that. A lot of the cooking vessels were made of copper. The high acidity in tomatoes reacted with the copper to form toxic copper oxides.

[aemiis-zoo.livejournal.com]

I saw a tomato plant growing on the side of the road and wondered how it got there, but didn't develop a hypothesis...maybe it did come from a discarded tomato...

[butsu.livejournal.com]

I simply love tomatoes. They are just adorable, aren't they?
And those yellow little flowers resemble those of cucumber very much.

[aplomada.livejournal.com]

I once found a "feral" tomato plant as well. I have to wonder though: They kept it as an ornamental? They're not particularly attractive plants and the flowers aren't showy. Maybe they thought the red ripe fruit was ornamental?

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Yes, the fruit was the ornamental part of it--yellow, orange, or red, from the size of berries to the size of apples, round, pear-shaped, or bulbous. Thomas Jefferson apparently grew it ornamentally.